Antoinette Cosway, the main character of this novel, is the crazy woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys imagines the life of Rochester’s first wife and the events that drove her to madness, demonstrating her knowledge and understanding of Jamaican/West Indies history and culture as well as the powerful socio-economic forces that influenced post-Emancipation development there. As Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction, …Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden […]
Life Imitates Art
This graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, perhaps knowns to some as the creator of the Bechdel test, to others as the creator of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, has won critical acclaim and is currently featured as The Atlantic’s 1book140 selection for LGBTQ month. I found to to be a truly engaging read both for its art and for its written content. The art is done in black, white and blue tones. Bechdel mixes up her own comic illustrations of her family with […]
Meh
This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself. Elyria has been […]
Blend In or Stand Out?
Everything I Never Told You is a novel about thwarted dreams, love, and parental expectations; about race in America in the 1970s, women’s rights, the desire to fit in and the desire to stand out. And the mysterious death of 16-year-old Lydia Lee. Was it suicide or foul play? The story begins with Lydia’s death. Her body has been found in the lake, and since it is known she couldn’t swim, foul play is assumed. Our initial image of Lydia is as a genius with […]
Mommy Wars, circa 1899
Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This classic of American Literature is the tragic story of Edna Pontellier as she awakens to the reality of her own desires and the limits her world places upon them. Like Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, this novel shows the unfairness of restrictions that men and society at large placed on women, and women’s growing […]
A Glamorous Tragedy
This YA novel, inspired in part by the life of Edie Sedgwick, follows the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of Addison Stone, an 18-year-old art phenom from Rhode Island who makes a huge splash on the NYC art scene before her untimely death. The story itself is bold and fast-paced (much like Addy) if a bit far fetched at times. Set in the current day, emails, Instagram photos of characters, and pictures of actual art works are peppered throughout the narrative, giving it a surprisingly […]
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