When I first finished this book, I *thought* I had a lot of strong opinions about it. Like, “Lotto is EXHAUSTING!”, or “These lucky bitches have a Shiba Inu puppy, and what do I have? Nothing!” But now, I’ve sat on it for a week, and all I can really muster for Fates and Furies is a “Meh.” I’m on record somewhere claiming that I love character-driven work, but also elsewhere claiming that a truly compelling plot can make me overlook deficiencies in other areas […]
Lovely writing and fresh story, but somehow came up short for me
This is a moving book and certainly worth reading, but I had such high hopes after the first few chapters and ended up feeling a little disappointed that the amazingness didn’t quite carry through to the end. This is a coming of age story of a Nigerian girl, Ijeoma, set in Nigeria in the late 1960s. Ijeoma’s world is disrupted when her beloved father is killed in a civil war (the Biafran War) and her mother sends her away to live with a teacher’s family while […]
[existentialist quote here]
3.5 stars. How the Dead Dream is a somewhat strange book that I nonetheless enjoyed. It’s one of those “slice of life” stories that is barely generalize-able to the population at large, but uses the character study of one man and his stunted relationships to satirize the societal values that spit out his type. Our first introduction to main character T. is as a young boy, when he is in the midst of cultivating a fetish of sorts for physical currency. The feel of coins […]
“Everyone’s got a different story.”
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 […]