While staring Positively Izzy by Terri Libenson, I was thinking it was like every Raina Telgemeier graphic novel out there. Which is not a bad thing, but since I have read all the original graphic novels of Telgemeier, I was not really digging Izzy. However, by the end there is enough differences that you are not just rereading Telgemeier. The story pans out differently even though the characters are still similar but then again, practically any story you could pick up about middle schoolers today […]
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
This is the second book of a series of five novels that Doris Lessing wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, called “The Children of Violence.” The first book dealt with our protagonist, Martha Quest, growing up on a white-owned farm in Rhodesia (to be clear she is white and of British heritage). So this is a second in the series, and certainly an observant reader could pick up this book without needing a lot of information from the first book to move forward, but knowing […]
She said no more about painting. She might have lost interest.
Like all or most Haruki Murakami books, this is a strange novel. It has his characters’ weird obsessions with food, sex, breast size, and a slightly off-balance orientation to the world. And like all his novels, or most of his novels, it has simple language describing interesting or complex ideas, and a struggle to make dialogue seem to represent real people and their conversations. (This exact idea will be the opposite in a future review of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, coming soon). This is a relatively […]
Accomplishing the circle of life as you go up the mountain path
Up the Mountain Path by Marianne Dubuc is a picture book that deals with death in a very “side manner” by not actually saying the character dies. That makes it accessible to all ages and can be used for not just “the death of X” (pet, grandparent, friend, etc.) but for loss and the “circle of life” comes out instead. The badger teaches the cat and then the cat teaches the rabbit. The “grandparent/grandchild” relationship in in play. I wish I could do half points […]