Its become very clear that Marisha Pessl is now a MUST author for me. I loved her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. And while I didn’t have the same immediate feelings for Night Film, that book crept up on me and ended up scaring me more than I thought possible. With Neverworld Wake, Pessl presents her first YA offering, and it offers a combination of the private school privileged world seen in Calamity Physics and a nightmarish view of human nature, similar to […]
Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!
First Bingo!!!! I’m going to be teaching “Dubliners” to my Advanced Fiction students this semester, so what luck that we had a square for old books :) Written in 1914, James Joyce hoped to capture the tenor of his city in a series of short stories that act like windows into the lives of Dublin’s inhabitants in the early 20th Century. Did I like this book? It grew on me. It’s not thematic or cyclic, nor does it have any reoccurring characters. At its core, […]
“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up.”
I like that Ibi Zoboi didn’t call this a “retelling” of Pride and Prejudice. She’s going with the term “remix.” That seems to fit a little better, because while the main plot is pretty similar, there are lots of little things that don’t quite fit into a strict retelling. What Zoboi did instead was take a story that most of us already know, flip parts of it around, and make it her own. And it really worked for me. Zuri Benitez was born and raised […]
Oh! To be sixteen once again
As a 16 yo, I didn’t experience a first love. A couple of crushes, but none of them were anything more than an occasional glance in the lift, or a quickening of pulse when they appeared in front of me. To read Rainbow Rowell describe it so minutely in normal-speak without being elaborate is a welcome peek into a world when feelings run amok, you barely understand what’s happening and yet you feel so much (so – much like my current mid-thirties, GOTCHA, dumb-ass […]