DNF: Becoming Jane Eyre

Becoming Jane Eyre
by Sheila Kohler


Publisher's Blurb:

The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent.

So unfolds the story of the Brontë sisters. At its center are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.

 
My Reaction: 
In a hurry to find entertainment for some time on the treadmill, I grabbed this library book sale purchase from a bookcase.  The first chapter was enough to tell me that it's not for me, though I did skim a little through the book and read the last several pages just to confirm that it didn't get better.

I didn't like the weird choice of "present continuous" tense.

I didn't like the switching back and forth between Charlotte's and her father's point of view.  (It's Becoming Jane Eyre.  I don't want Charlotte's father's p.o.v.!)

I didn't like the inclusion of medical crap or the memories of Charlotte's mother's agonizingly slow death.  Please, no.  Not now, not ever. 

I just... didn't like anything about it, really.

This one will be going into the donation box, immediately.