My final review for 2014 is a collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), perhaps best known for Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast. This collection is my first exposure to Dinesen’s work; the title and time of year made it seem appropriate. I have read a few re-imagined fairy tales this year, but Winter’s Tales does not fit the fairy tale model. In fact, after reading the first few stories, I wasn’t sure what to make of them at all and considered […]
Giving Rebirth is Not For the Weak
There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams. Even 25 years after it was first published, the themes of this novel remain relevant: the immigrant experience of trying to assimilate into US culture and the particular experience of a young Hindu woman who chooses to defy traditional expectations and dares to remake herself. Violence, including murder, is a part not just of Jasmine’s personal story but of other women, […]
Charlie Brown Grows Up and Moves to Canada
This 1993 novel won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie. The Shipping News is the story of a man named Quoyle over the course of a few eventful, transformative years of his life. Proulx’s unique writing style combines poetry and humor to create characters who might be from a folk tale or might be your next door neighbor. Hive spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramps, he survived childhood….” Quoyle is a lot like Charlie Brown […]
The Twelve Dancing Princesses, circa 1920
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is a reimagining of the fairy tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses set in 1920s New York city. It features twelve lovely and lively sisters, their miserly and evil king-like father, speak easies, bootleggers and flappers. The girls’ mother has died and dad, disappointed in having no male heir, has kept his girls imprisoned their entire lives in the upstairs of their Fifth Avenue house. Mr. Hamilton is a shrewd businessman but terrible father. Oldest daughter Jo, in order to […]
You Should Be So Lucky to Have a Woman as a Friend
Published in 1973, Toni Morrison’s second novel Sula is a short but incredibly rich story about friendship and community, and about the ways that fear and hatred can bring people together and tear them apart. Morrison’s characters can be enticing and alluring, powerful and defiant in the face of poverty, prejudice, disappointment, and death. The title character Sula is a rebel amongst her community in Medallion, Ohio. As a black woman in the 1920s and ’30s, she refused to be confined by the limits society […]
Man is a Monster
Literary classics earn their designation by presenting themes that resonate throughout the ages. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is just such a literary classic. She wrote this short but brilliant tale when she was about 20, while she, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron were on holiday in Switzerland. As the poor weather prevented their outdoor adventures, the three entertained themselves with stories of the “supernatural.” Shelley’s Frankenstein has become a world renowned classic and a staple of Halloween partiers everywhere. And yet, Shelley’s scary […]
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