This book was given to me as a parting gift when I left Yorkshire. I had been to Haworth to see the Brontë parsonage and I’d walked the moors behind the house and I had lived in and understood the sweet melodic dialect of West Yorkshire. All this lent the book a certain sweetness that the two horrible main characters did everything in their power to disrupt. I mean, I knew this wasn’t going to be a love story, but like ooohhhh booyy is it […]
Poems; Girls; Heights; Faces
Long Way Down – 5/5 To paraphrase Jason Reynolds in an interview he gives at the end of the book, this is a combination of “Boyz in the Hood” and “A Christmas Carol.” As with other Jason Reynolds novels, there’s a central conflict between what a character feels is the right thing to do based on his lived experience, the implicit messages that happen around him, the images, his history, and lots of other coded and secretive influences versus the on the paper ethics of […]
One Great Pre-Victorian Domestic
I think a personal theme of this year’s cannonball has been the ruining of books well-remembered. I read Wuthering Heights in high school and loved it. As that was many years ago, I thought I’d do a re-read to see if I would still enjoy what the book jacket describes as ‘one of the most haunting and atmospheric love stories ever written.’ I’m sure I agreed with that sentiment as a sixteen-year-old. But now…. Let me start with a list of all the things this […]
A story of incredibly passionate love and vengeance.
Fifty-second book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. It seems that one can only despise someone with true passion, if they have once loved them just as much. And there is no story that can equal Wuthering Heights when it comes to passion. The story is tragic, but beautifully so and the reason why tragedy is such a thing of beauty is because it takes much loving and longing to make a tragedy. Nothing that happens in Wuthering heights is subdued. There is unabashed […]