Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore

Summary from Goodreads:

Jane has lived an ordinary life, raised by her aunt Magnolia—an adjunct professor and deep sea photographer. Jane counted on Magnolia to make the world feel expansive and to turn life into an adventure. But Aunt Magnolia was lost a few months ago in Antarctica on one of her expeditions.

Now, with no direction, a year out of high school, and obsessed with making umbrellas that look like her own dreams (but mostly just mourning her aunt), she is easily swept away by Kiran Thrash—a glamorous, capricious acquaintance who shows up and asks Jane to accompany her to a gala at her family's island mansion called Tu Reviens.

Jane remembers her aunt telling her: "If anyone ever invites to you to Tu Reviens, promise me that you'll go." With nothing but a trunkful of umbrella parts to her name, Jane ventures out to the Thrash estate. Then her story takes a turn, or rather, five turns. What Jane doesn't know is that Tu Reviens will offer her choices that can ultimately determine the course of her untethered life. But at Tu Reviens, every choice comes with a reward, or a price.

Review:

So, I have serious mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I love Kristin Cashore, and there is not a single doubt in my mind that she is an excellent writer. Her writing is beautiful. And she successfully changes voice, writing style, and genre five times through out this book.  On the other hand, I found the pacing to be painstakingly slow, the characters boring, and the whole thing extraordinarily repetitive (my least favorite characteristic in a book).

The book starts with the main character recovering from the loss of her guardian. Her guardian made her promise to go to Tu Reviens if she was ever invited. And an old friend/tutor shows up and invites her. From there on, Jane makes a lot of artistic umbrellas, walks a lot of gothic hallways, explores an exceptionally strange mansion, and meets new friends.

At one point, Jane has to make up her mind about which direction to go in following the breadcrumbs of a mystery. It’s a bit like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story in that respect. Jane goes one way, which leads her down an art theft mystery story. And right when everything concludes, the reader is taken back to that point where she has to make up her mind. She goes a different way, and then comes a spy/thriller story. That story concludes, and it all goes back to that one moment again, and then Jane experiences a horror story. This happens 5 times with 5 different genres of story. You don’t choose your adventure; you have to experience all 5.

As a writer and a creative thinker, I appreciate all the work and fun this author must have had in making this novel. There are little Eggs about parallel universes, other versions of oneself, etc in each story. You have to read each story to have the following story make more sense. However, it gets so repetitive. Having to watch the same scene with the same character freak out about a piece of art was highly annoying. I got bored with the similarities. At first it was kind of fun, searching for the similarities while experiencing something new. But, after this repeats a couple of times, I got rather frustrated.

There was a weird number of Winnie the Pooh references. At first I loved this because I’m a children’s librarian, but then even that got annoying. Some parts of the plot were just not comparable to Pooh and Piglet, and it felt like the author was stretching things to make things work sometimes. Some of the stories really were so far fetched. For some reason, the sci-fi one felt more believable than the horror one, which was just plain weird. They all had a weirdness to them, but that one was like the others mixed with a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll on drugs.

I wanted to love this one. I loved this author’s other work. I love the diverse cast. I love the concept of this book –a book that redefines genre. But, it’s super thick, confusing, and slow. I found some of the side characters kind of interesting, but none of them were flushed out enough in any of the stories for me to genuinely care about them. And Jane just felt too normal (minus the umbrella thing). I kept wanting to like her, but like the book, I couldn’t really.

So, I guess, all in all, power to Kristin Cashore for doing something different. It just wasn’t for me. The repetitive slowness was a big damper. I wanted to like the characters more. Though, I absolutely adored the dog. I love the idea of what the author attempted. It just took so long for me to understand it and then I almost didn’t even finish it. It took me 2 weeks to read (a very long time). I give it a 5/10.