Vincent Darlage > Recent Status Updates

Lauren Blackwood explicitly frames her novel as an Ethiopian retelling of Jane Eyre, but instead of a line-by-line recreation, it’s a spiritual reinterpretation. The bones of Gothic fiction — isolation, forbidden desire, guilt, the supernatural, and the struggle for autonomy — are all there, but reimagined through a new cultural lens. Am loving it so far.

OK. The basic plot is this - A lady's great aunt died, and she has to sort through her stuff, and she finds a wooden duck she's mildly interested in. All of this is established by page 12. It's now page 100, and nothing past that has happened. It's like this author simply wrote down every conversation she had with her friends for a couple of days and said, "There. A book."