Benoîte-Marie (Berie) is our narrator. We start with her in Paris, where she’s traveling with her husband, who is lecturing on Tay-Sachs disease. Berie is vaguely dissatisfied, filled with ennui about her marriage. She muses about her teenage-hood in Horsehearts, upstate NY, and her deep friendship with Silsby Chaussée. It’s a story told in wonderfully crafted, evocative prose, that captures not so much a story arc, but rather the feeling of being almost grown up, wandering, being consumed by a friendship, finding an identity while losing your innocence, feeling lost […]
Light on perks, heavy on wallflower
In honor of National Banned Books week I wanted to read something in the top 10 most banned books of 2013. Perks of Being a Wallflower was on the list, could be read in a short period of time and was available at my local library, the trifecta! I didn’t get a chance to see the film when it came out but I knew that it had received positive reviews. Even though I had heard good things I thought it was maybe going to be […]
“and a weak mailed fist / Clenched ignorant against the sky!”
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is harsh and beautiful and sad. It’s based on autobiography, and tells of a young Jeanette growing up in a tiny town in the North of England. The claustrophobia of the town is strongly evoked–it’s the sort of place where everyone knows everyone else, everyone has a place and is expected to stay in it, and any attempts to hide or move or change must be carried out under severe scrutiny by neighbours, friends and family and probably followed […]
Perhaps not Staggering Genius, but Heartbreaking and Profound
After reading his The Circle and then his latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They…?, I decided it was high time to go back to Egger’s first major work and see what all the fuss was about. Written when he was a mere twenty-two, this memoir/novel describes a difficult life starting with the death of both his parents from cancer within a month or two of each other, when Eggers is just 21, his younger brother Toph is just eight, his sister Beth is in law […]
“You have to find your own rules.”
I became interested in American Dervish because I wanted to read something from a different perspective: in this case, a novel by a Pakistani author reflecting on a young American Muslim boy’s experience. The story opens with Hayat Shah when he is college-aged, as he attends an Islamic Studies class. The professor, with whom Hayat is friendly, makes statements that are blasphemous to some of the other Muslim students in attendance, but Hayat himself has a somewhat blasé attitude toward his professor’s claims. Afterward, a friend […]
Girls, Girls, Girls!
This graphic novel, published this year, is a short story about two girls (early teens) whose families meet every summer in Ontario at Awago Beach. Rose is an only child whose parents seem fairly ordinary. Windy is an adopted only child who goes to the beach with her mother and grandmother. It is a “coming of age” story that has been getting favorable reviews within comic book circles and even from the New York Times. For a short story (you could easily read it in […]