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 […]
How can you be a teenage misfit when your parents applaud and encourage rebellion?
Nikolaj moves to a newly constructed house in a suburb in one of the counties surrounding Oslo in the early 1970s. His father is one of the architects who planned the area, and is full of dreams about the social opportunities the new affordable housing will mean for families in the area. As it turns out, most of the families who move in stick to a rigid routine of conformity and normality – their children wear the same thing, cut their hair the same way, […]
Growing up motherless is hard to do
3. 5 stars Lily Owens grows up isolated, neglected by her father and lonely on a peach farm in Georgia in the 1960s. Her only friend is the woman who acts as her nanny, Rosaleen, a former field hand who’s taken care of her since Lily’s mother died in a tragic accident when Lily was little more than a toddler. When Rosaleen is forced to flee town after accidentally insulting some white men while on her way to registering to vote, Lily insists on coming […]