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 […]
My English Class Book Report Turned Book Review (Sorry Not Sorry)
The common theme throughout this book is what it’s like to be a black woman. In almost every story, the main character is a young black woman and you see the world through her eyes. Through her stories, Johnson is trying to show the humanity of black women and their everyday struggles in a predominantly white world. In “Melvin in the Sixth Grade”, you meet eleven year old Avery, she is in middle school and though she may not realize it fully, the other children […]
Enter at your own risk.
I struggled with this rating and review. House of Leaves is different things to different people: for many (many, many, MANY) people it is mind-blowing, complex, and a richly rewarding treat if you take the time to completely parse it. This is not a small undertaking. Entire sections are printed like this — or this — and the visual impact of coming across pages like that — intended, obviously, to draw the reader into the mindset of the characters — is daunting. There are oodles […]
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