This is the Award Winner. The Dorothy Canfield Fisher award is a Vermont state award that the books are picked by adults (though I am not always sure why they were the pickers as one was a professor at my college who had no English or child background that I knew of) and then voted on by the kids. Of course, the year I did this award the “cool kids” pick won. But that is the perfect lead in to this book. It is 1943. […]
One of these days, I’m definitely going to have to learn how to spell Marisha Pessl without looking.
Its become very clear that Marisha Pessl is now a MUST author for me. I loved her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. And while I didn’t have the same immediate feelings for Night Film, that book crept up on me and ended up scaring me more than I thought possible. With Neverworld Wake, Pessl presents her first YA offering, and it offers a combination of the private school privileged world seen in Calamity Physics and a nightmarish view of human nature, similar to […]
Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!
First Bingo!!!! I’m going to be teaching “Dubliners” to my Advanced Fiction students this semester, so what luck that we had a square for old books 🙂 Written in 1914, James Joyce hoped to capture the tenor of his city in a series of short stories that act like windows into the lives of Dublin’s inhabitants in the early 20th Century. Did I like this book? It grew on me. It’s not thematic or cyclic, nor does it have any reoccurring characters. At its core, […]
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
While I already knew of Alison Bechdel and had some idea of the what her first graphic novel is about, I genuinely wasn’t prepared for how much Fun Home would affect me emotionally. It was a roller coaster of feelings, beautifully told and illustrated. Bechdel is only slightly older than I am, so her memoir of growing up in the 70s and 80s had some very familiar echoes. Though our families were dysfunctional in completely different ways, the family dynamics, cultural and social norms which she describes in Fun Home very […]
“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up.”
I like that Ibi Zoboi didn’t call this a “retelling” of Pride and Prejudice. She’s going with the term “remix.” That seems to fit a little better, because while the main plot is pretty similar, there are lots of little things that don’t quite fit into a strict retelling. What Zoboi did instead was take a story that most of us already know, flip parts of it around, and make it her own. And it really worked for me. Zuri Benitez was born and raised […]
Oh! To be sixteen once again
As a 16 yo, I didn’t experience a first love. A couple of crushes, but none of them were anything more than an occasional glance in the lift, or a quickening of pulse when they appeared in front of me. To read Rainbow Rowell describe it so minutely in normal-speak without being elaborate is a welcome peek into a world when feelings run amok, you barely understand what’s happening and yet you feel so much (so – much like my current mid-thirties, GOTCHA, dumb-ass […]
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