This is a moving book and certainly worth reading, but I had such high hopes after the first few chapters and ended up feeling a little disappointed that the amazingness didn’t quite carry through to the end. This is a coming of age story of a Nigerian girl, Ijeoma, set in Nigeria in the late 1960s. Ijeoma’s world is disrupted when her beloved father is killed in a civil war (the Biafran War) and her mother sends her away to live with a teacher’s family while […]
[existentialist quote here]
3.5 stars. How the Dead Dream is a somewhat strange book that I nonetheless enjoyed. It’s one of those “slice of life” stories that is barely generalize-able to the population at large, but uses the character study of one man and his stunted relationships to satirize the societal values that spit out his type. Our first introduction to main character T. is as a young boy, when he is in the midst of cultivating a fetish of sorts for physical currency. The feel of coins […]
“Everyone’s got a different story.”
I’ll start by saying I totally get the appeal of Room. The use of the unreliable narrator is particularly effective, creating a palpable dramatic irony and enhancing the reader’s apprehension by forcing us to fill in for ourselves all of the horrific details that our five-year-old narrator Jack does not, and cannot, understand about Room. I’m really digging deep into what I remember from high school English lit classes, but I digress. The point is that the exaggerated naivete of the narrator ratchets up tension […]
Best of Wives and Best of Women
I’m not a huge fan of literary fiction. I find it depressing, usually. Why are the characters always so desperate, and desperately unhappy? Why do they always have such depressing, gross sex lives, and why, WHY must books of literary fiction always contain a description of just how unappealing the protagonist’s body is? I mean, I live in a human body. I’m aware that most human bodies are very flawed. Do I have to read about Lotto’s stomach flab, and the way Mathilde’s finger can […]
Furiously Ambitious
I know there are some legitimate issues with this book, but I’m giving it five stars for its pure ambition and energetic writing. I was quite reluctant to read this, actually, because I couldn’t get through Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton (I should mention that I started it when I was 36 weeks pregnant, so my attention span was not tip top). After seeing this one so consistently on the must-read lists for 2015, I picked it up at the library and couldn’t put […]
Hell Hath No Fury…
This is a quick-paced, brutally frank, and sometimes hilarious look at a woman scorned. The first line of the book jumps right into the action — “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” On the surface, this is a story that’s been told a million times. Husband has an affair, leaves wife. Wife feels desperate, sad, angry. Wife starts to feel better and then finds love again. But Ferrante is a brilliant writer who can purposely pick […]
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