Kwame Alexander won the Newbery Award the same week that Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was announced for publication. Of course, Lee’s news totally trumped Alexander’s achievement, so to show some solidarity, I requested his novel from the library. And I was blown away. The Crossover is a verse novel (that is, a novel told in poems) about Josh Bell, a tween boy who is a star basketball player on his middle-school team. His twin brother Jordan, or JB, is on the team with […]
“War is too strange to process alone.”
I was intrigued by Redeployment when I heard that it was about the Iraq War. And then, when it won the National Book Award in 2014, my curiosity reached a fever pitch. How could a collection of short stories trump the magnificent Station Eleven or All the Light We Cannot See, both of which I read and LOVED before this book? As it turns out, the committee knew what it was about. To put it simply, Redeployment is haunting. It is gritty, hard-eyed, and unflinching […]
Losing your mind or your Cadillac?
I’ve been reading a lot of twentieth-century drama. But none has come quite so close to my current dissertation topic as Glengarry Glen Ross. Back when I was first doing my research, my dissertation director referenced it a few times, which meant that it needed to go on my list. It’s definitely an intriguing idea, and I liked the overlapping nature of the dialogue, though I bet so much of the play’s richness occurs in the delivery of the lines and the interactions of the […]
The boys of history
I’ve heard about The History Boys as a film, and I *believe* the film is on Netflix. The Chancellor saw it and liked it pretty well. So when I realized it had been a play first (thanks to my National Theatre sampler) and that it starred Dominic Cooper (I really, really like him as an actor), I decided that it was time to read it and see if it would be something I could add to my burgeoning teaching syllabus. The History Boys takes places […]
A play about physics, but not about physics.
In my binge on plays after viewing the sampler from the PBS special, I included Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, which promised to be set during World War II. As it turns out, the play is far more complicated than that. Based on historical figures and an actual historical event, Copenhagen covers the relationship between scientists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, with feedback from Bohr’s wife Margrethe. The play opens in an indeterminate time, because all three characters have died and are now talking in […]
The glory of mermaid friends without the silly puns.
I read Deep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly for CBR6, and I was excited to hear that the sequel, Rogue Wave would be coming out this last January. Well. My library didn’t get a copy for like two months, and the wait has been awful. But I tore through it this evening, and it was well worth the wait. Thankfully, the mer-puns have been replaced by much weightier plot points and character building moments. This book, however, carries heavier tales of chaos and destruction. The beautiful […]
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