Upcoming attractions
I have just posted several reviews – and over the next few weeks look for reviews of Blue Jasmine, Keeping Corner, The Sky Village, The Red Necklace, and more!
The Shiniest Jewel by Marian Henley
This small book is one of a kind. It combines the memoir with the form of a graphic novel. The artwork is black and white and simply drawn, and at first I was unimpressed. I have seen better artwork in a variety of webcomics.
Something about the starkness of the art though, mirrored the stark language in the memoir. It wasn’t that it was simply written, but that you had the feeling that Marian Henley put all of herself out there to see as a way of talking about what her adoption experience was like.
This memoir is more than just an adoption story though, it is about transitions and the place between things – the transition into motherhood, the transition from confirmed bachlorette to married woman, the transition of her father from life to death…and how she handles each change as it comes. The story through its wording exudes a sense of taking life as it comes, its ups and downs with dignity.
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
This book was an amazing read. I found that I just could not put it down, I had to know how it ended. Sarah’s Key follows two timelines, alternating each chapter, and shows the developments in the life of Sarah, a 10 year old Jewish girl living in France, and that of Julia Jarmond; an American married to a brooding Frenchman, who is assigned to write about the history of an infamous roundup of Jews for the concentration camps.
Reading about Sarah, and what has happened to her throughout her life was heartbreaking. Even though “Sarah” is a character of fiction, somewhere there were many girls just like her who faced horrors beyond our possibility to imagine. Many passages found me curled on my couch, reading avidly, with tears in my eyes. Tatiana creates characters that are enduring and heartrending to follow.
Julia becomes so obsessed with finding out the truth behind not only this horrifying round up and the French people’s willingness to pretend it never happened, but the truth behind the secret her husband’s family has been carrying so long that she risks the loss of everything in the process but her self respect. Wrapped up in her own emotional journey, will she lose her husband’s love? Read it and find out…
Sorry for the long wait…
I have been falling behind in my reviews lately because I have been caught up in work and school. I work for a non-profit after school program full time while getting a masters degree in education. Our campus is really short staffed right now, so I have had a crazy amount of work to do. Over the next few weeks I will post several reviews, and then after January it might be a while again. I graduate in May, and I will be able to do a lot more in the way of reviews.
A new review is up, though the book has been out a while, I want to post some short reviews on some of the books I have read lately – some new, some not so new.
Schooled by Anisha Lakhani
This book was written with a delightful amount of snarky cynicism. Her viewpoint on the private education system and the interaction between educators and parents is something that any teacher can sympathize with. She skillfully conveys the emotional and moral dilemma she faces as she weighs a hefty paycheck, the life she has always wanted, and luxuries beyond what she ever expected against her professional ethics, personal belief system, and complete loss of time to herself.
There were times when I felt downright envious reading about the shopping sprees and parties – who wouldn’t want to live life like that? Then again, there were a lot of times where as an educator, I have run into a lot of the same problems as this teacher did, except in a completely different economic class. What teacher hasn’t struggled with getting students to engage in a lesson, do homework, or turn in original work?
There were passages, however, where the book seemed more like reading a bad soap opera or opening the pages of a lurid tabloid. The actions of some parties just seems over written and false, and I am not sure if I could suspend my belief enough for it to pass, even for fiction. This was a decent book, but not one of the best that I have seen published by Hyperion.
