Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In today’s world, it’s ground zero of the hipster renaissance. It’s more expensive to live in Brooklyn lately than it is to live in Manhattan. But it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, when A Tree Grows in Brooklyn takes place, Williamsburg was where the immigrants and/or poor people lived. People like Francie Nolan and her family. If you’re a fan of plot-driven novels, this probably isn’t going to be the book for you. Nothing much really happens…two young people, the children […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Pride and Prejudice
ETA 4/21/16: I messed up when I marked two reviews in a row as #46, so this review actually isn’t my Cannonball. That honor belongs to my dubious review of Captive Prince. Shame on many fronts. The mistake has now been noted on both reviews. This is the third in my series of reviews wherein I get weird and write them in the form of letters to the characters. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it shall be glorious. One every two months […]
“Oh, well. Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.”
This is all terribly confusing. It started out confusing and never really resolved. The Alice in the title is referring to Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. We basically alternate between Ada, Alice’s friend, and Lydia, Alice’s sister. Ada has slipped her governess, Miss Armstrong, and has continued unescorted to bring a jar of marmalade to her friend Alice’s family. Ada has stumbled into Wonderland and goes on a search for her friend. Wonderland is as it always was, confusing yet sometimes profound. Our Lydia […]
Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Sense and Sensibility
A couple of years ago for CBR6, I re-read Jane Eyre, and because I was overwhelmed with the task of writing a review for such a classic book, I decided to get weird and write the review in the form of letters to the characters. Since then, with an eventual plan to re-read all of Jane Austen’s books, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that I’d do the same with as many future classic books that I could. So. This is me […]
If you have sex, you will get pregnant and you will die
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Victorian-era woman who gets her hoe on will get her divine comeuppance. 19th century literature is like an 80s horror movie-you have sex, you die. It doesn’t matter if the woman is cheating on her husband, or straight-up raped by her boss-extramarital hanky-panky must be punished. I decide to combine my reviews of Madame Bovary and Tess of D’Urbervilles, rather than spending two reviews covering a lot of the same ground. *spoilers for some really old books* […]
The cutest little old ladies
Cranford is such a lovely little book. I’m a big fan of both North & South and Wives & Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, so I’m slowly making my way to her other books. Cranford is less of a traditional novel than the other two books. Really, it’s a set of connected vignettes or novellas. Most of the action takes place in tiny Cranford and within the social circle of the highest class in the town. It’s a long running joke in the novel that Cranford […]
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