Cal Stephanides, narrator of Middlesex, tells the story of the past three generations of his family. He begins with his grandparents' incestuous escape from war-torn Asia Minor, through his parents' all-American courtship, and then through his own childhood. Cal was born Calliope Helen Stephanides, believed by everyone to be a girl until adolescence began to reveal the truth. Cal intersperses the epic of his family's story with updates on his adult life working for the embassy in Berlin, commenting on the world's view of him, and meeting someone to whom he finally might be able to tell his secret.
I read Middlesex for school. In the past year, I have read five books for fun and eleven for school. If you follow IWMCW regularly, then you've probably noticed... But I actually enjoyed Middlesex and have had to do only a bit of work with it so far, so I haven't yet wrung it out. When I had to pick my novel for summer reading, I was down to this one and Cider House Rules by John Irving. My mom said that she thought I'd really enjoy Jeffrey Eugenides' writing style, so I got Middlesex (also, it was the slightly shorter one).
Cal Stephanides, narrator of Middlesex, tells the story of the past three generations of his family. He begins with his grandparents' incestuous escape from war-torn Asia Minor, through his parents' all-American courtship, and then through his own childhood. Cal was born Calliope Helen Stephanides, believed by everyone to be a girl until adolescence began to reveal the truth. Cal intersperses the epic of his family's story with updates on his adult life working for the embassy in Berlin, commenting on the world's view of him, and meeting someone to whom he finally might be able to tell his secret.
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Despite having read this book for school, I haven't yet had to work on the accompanying assignment, so I've still got the energy to review it!
Ifemelu lives a frustrated life in Nigeria, her college classes constantly cancelled due to strikes. Seeing no end to the tumult, she joins her cousin in America--and discovers race. Suddenly she is black, and that fact has a total effect on her new life. It changes her relationships, her job prospects, the way she relates to her family back in Nigeria. Ifemelu's college boyfriend, Obinze, finds himself struggling to make a life in the UK where, despite his intellectual inclinations, he is forced to work for shipping company after shipping company, never able to stay in one place for long and hoping that his employers never discover his undocumented status. Fifteen years later, Ifemelu prepares to move back to Nigeria, where Obinze has long since returned to live a wealthy, superficial life among corruption and loveless relationships. Over the course of years, Adichie follows the breaking of her protagonists' connection, and the process of trying to reforge it, all amongst the twisted, centuries-old, beautiful, horrifying mess of race in America from the unique perspective of an outsider upon whom this complex burden has been forced without context. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston, Picador 1976, 1981)8/30/2016 Well, well, well. This has been interesting. The Woman Warrior is the second of my two assigned books for this summer (of which today, August 30th, is the last day). All us rising sophomores had to read A Thousand Splendid Suns and those of us going into honors English also picked one memoir from a list of four. Being me, I chose The Woman Warrior, partly because the description on our choice sheet called it the most challenging of the four.
They weren't kidding. Considering that I only just finished this book minutes ago (probably about an hour by the time I finish this review), my thoughts are not completely processed, but I wanted to put up this one last review before we go into IWMCW's awkward season--AKA, the school year, during which my reviews can be far between and come in flocks. Although I hope it won't be long before I can review Origins, another science book! Maxine Hong Kingston grew up the oldest (although maybe just the oldest surviving) child of Chinese immigrants during the 1940s and 50s. In her memoir, she tells in five short-story-like chapters of her experiences balancing cultures and trying to understand that which she has never directly been a part of but is expected to know all about. She focuses particularly on being a Chinese-American woman. Themes of silence, mother-daughter relationships, culture, tradition, sexism and racism, insanity, and stories convey these experiences. I've been reading Origins by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith, but I had to put it aside partway through to do my summer reading for school... So it's been a while. But here's the first of my summer books. Ordinarily I don't review books that I'm assigned, but I thought I could make an exception for this one.
Mariam is a harami--a bastard child. When her father, rich city-dweller Jalil Khan, found out that his maid was pregnant with his child, he cast Mariam's mother away, to the outskirts of a nearby village. Mariam spends her childhood anxiously waiting for weekly visits from Jalil, who gives her gifts, tells her stories, and teaches her to fish. Nana, by contrast, speaks harshly to Mariam and warns her that Jalil is not the god Mariam thinks he is. But when tragedy destroys her family, teenage Mariam is shipped off to Kabul to marry Rasheed, a middle-aged, foul-tempered shoemaker. Everything changes. Laila is a well-educated Kabuli girl with friends, a crush, and two loving parents. But the absence of her two much older brothers, who went to fight for the jihad, leaves her mother bedridden and listless most days. And as the war intensifies and the fighting factions keep firing on Kabul, everyday life becomes ever more dangerous. People leave the city. Her friends all leave the city. And when disaster comes for Laila's family, she is brought together with Mariam, Rasheed's reclusive wife down the street. A Thousand Splendid Suns follows these two lives as they come together amidst war after war in Afghanistan--from the Soviet invasion in the 1970's to the bombs dropped by Bush after 9/11 and the scattering of the Taliban. Struggling to survive in intolerable circumstances--on the street and in the home--Mariam and Laila must become friends if they are to claim their right to happiness and love. Well, okay. I was at Powell's and wandering through the fiction section, and came across this book--I think not even in the right place--on a shelf. It looked interesting, and so I bought it.
Yeah, well. Interesting is one word. I really wanted to like this book. I mean, secret societies, alternate universes, and mysterious pasts? I'd like to read about that! Except it utterly flops when the person doing the writing does it badly. I read it quickly to get it over with, I think. In 1890, Captain John Hardwick is finally released after years of captivity and interrogation in Burma. He returns home to London (in a rather John-Watson style, I noticed), confused and addicted to the opium that his torturers used on him as part of their evil acts. But the hope for a quiet civilian life, possibly as the writer he never was able to become before, is squashed when John receives summons to the Apollonian, a gentleman's club. There, John is informed that the anarchist bombings that have been happening all around London for the past several months are something much more sinister--and John, with his exceptional military skills and the endurance demonstrated during his captivity, must find out the truth and stop the explosions. Hello, readers. Night Vale is now podcast, theatre, and book. That I listen to the podcast and have read the book is entirely thanks to my friends Kyra and Aida, so, thanks, guys. *Makes an unnamed slurping noise and squirms in their general direction.*
N.B.: You don't have to have listened to the podcast to read the book, but it might be helpful. Meaning, reading this review could spoil some parts of the podcast for you. You can listen on iTunes, YouTube, Bandcamp, and I think some other places, too. The podcast is weird and wonderful. You shall not regret it. "It is a friendly desert community, where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale" (1). We fans know these words well. They are, after all, a perfect description of the strange town that we have fallen in love with. In this strange town, Jackie Fierro, the perpetually nineteen-year-old owner of the pawnshop has her life disrupted. One day, a man wearing a tan jacket and carrying a deerskin suitcase, and whose face and name are impossible to remember, brings a piece of paper to the pawnshop to be pawned. The paper reads "KING CITY" in pencil. Jackie gives the man thirty dollars and an idea about time and takes the paper. And can't let go. Jackie quickly realizes that the piece of paper that won't leave her hand and tells her "KING CITY" every time she looks at it has changed her life forever. But tracking down the man in the tan jacket is difficult, considering that no one who has seen him can remember him, or even seems willing to talk about him. Diane Crayton has been struggling to raise her son Josh, who is a fifteen-year-old shape-shifter. But Josh, who rarely talks to her, has begun asking questions about his missing father again. Diane does everything she can to keep Josh from finding his father, but it doesn't help that she's been seeing him all over town, and that everyone at work thinks she's crazy when she insists that an employee who no one can remember has vanished. Okay. At long last, none of the books in my to-read stack have been there for longer than three or four months. That's not too bad. I've read everything I got last Christmas, everything I got for my birthday, and everything I got over the summer. I think that's progress. I believe I got The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender in September. I ran across it on the Powell's website, thought it looked interesting, and had it put on hold for me at the City of Books. (That hyperlink on the word "Powell's" will take you to the website of the most amazing bookstore in the world. The City of Books is their largest location--an entire city block of BOOKS. Silly grin. If you don't live in or around Portland, OR it's not much good to you, but if you visit, make a stop there.)
After years of research into her strange family's strange history, Ava Lavender is ready to share it with us. She was born with wings, wings with brown speckled feathers. Her brother Henry was unusual, too--he disliked being touched, and he didn't speak (at least not to living people) until he was a teenager. Their mother, Viviane, could put a smell to everything, including happiness and people. The boy she loved as a child and a teenager left a mark on her neck where he kissed her. Her mother, Emelienne, perceived much more of the world than most people, and took it all to mean things. Even resolving to not love people couldn't stop them from dying, it seemed. Her mother, known only as Maman, faded into a pile of blue ashes. She had lost everything. Beginning with her grandmother's childhood in France and carrying the story through to her own life in Seattle, Ava Lavender's family history involves many secrets uncovered and mysteries solved. After sitting at the bottom of my to-read stack since last Christmas, I finally decided in November to stop saving this fantasy epic, bound between its misty blue covers, and read it already (after all, it's a book. Books are meant to be read).
I must say I can't remember how I read series when I was in elementary school and series were pretty much all I read. A lot of what I read was Warriors by Erin Hunter, and so I believe that I mostly read through that incredibly long series while slipping in other books when I had something else, and not another Warriors. Anyway, I've been reading series totally broken up in the past few years. Not only that, but I've been reading books by the same author not part of the same series! Shadowmarch here is an example. I'm halfway through Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and yet I interrupt it with a different story by the same person! Not my favorite thing to do. Good thing I can keep stories straight, or else I'd be a bit confused upon starting To Green Angel Tower Part I. Well, Shadowmarch had to be read, and I am glad. I was excited to see what Williams had done after he'd had some more experience with writing. In a stony keep, surrounded by ocean, royal twins Briony and Barrick Eddon have somehow found themselves in charge of Southmarch. With those who should have ruled before them imprisoned or dead, the teenagers are pressed onto the throne to oversee the troubles of their lands at a time when the lands have never been more troubled. In the very near north, hidden by enchanted mists, the strange fae Qar are stirring. They are no longer content to hide behind the defenses they constructed the last time they tangled with mortals... The centuries of waiting in their cold, gray world are over. They want their old homeland back from the sunlanders. Yet it seems that the Qar are not the only thing that should be worrying Briony and Barrick. Powerful human forces from the south press in, not to mention betrayal from within. Wow. Wow. I finished Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore a month ago, and I'm still amazed.
Clay Jannon used to design the website of NewBagel, a San Francisco startup that made the perfect bagel, based on an algorithm. Shape. Texture. Taste. All perfected with NewBagel's recipe. But then the Recession arrived, taking NewBagel with it. Clay was left to online reading and halfhearted searching for job opportunities in his apartment shared by a movie set designer and an android-like PR professional. One night, Clay walks into Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, a building that, in the front, appears to be an ordinary bookstore. But if you walk into the back room, you discover the towering shelves of books, three stories high, each book with a strange title... Mr. Penumbra, the establishment's elderly, sharp-witted owner, offers Clay a job as a night clerk. Clay soon discovers that the bookstore is even stranger than he was expecting--not many people come to the 24-hour bookstore, and when they do, they belong to a small group of eccentrics who check out the mysterious books on the back shelf. Further investigation and help from his friends and acquaintances, including his middle school best friend Neel Shah (who is now, conveniently, the rich founder of a middleware company) and his new Googler girlfriend Kat Potente, Clay begins to get an idea of what's really going on at the bookstore--or so he thinks. I was laughing with delight when writing my last review because I figured out how to hyperlink in Weebly. Hint: It's the little hyperlink insignia button in the formatting menu. Duh. I should notice things that are important, instead of that the girl halfway across the room has got a Dole banana sticker on her sweater sleeve (although who knows; maybe that was really important). Anyway, I love hyperlinking because it's almost like coding because you hide something inside a different something and it looks like the different something, but it's not as hard or confusing as coding (although over the summer I did sort of figure out how to program a Turing machine--sort of). That's why I was laughing with delight. But then I got caught up in writing about Stone of Farewell, and forgot to tell the world how much I love hyperlinking and please forgive me if I mention some of my book reviews in my other book reviews just for the sake of hyperlinking to them.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with Conversion. Make me shut up. Colleen Rowley is under a lot of stress. She's about to graduate from St. Joan's high school, and she's applying to several top-level universities, and she wants to be valedictorian--meaning she's in tenth-of-a-point competition with a classmate--and her amazing history teacher has the gall to get sick, leaving an objectionable sub to manage the class. On the day that Mr. Mitchell doesn't show up, some of the high schoolers start acting strange. Clara, the most popular and well-liked girl in the school, has what appears to be a seizure in the middle of class. Her two best friends shortly follow her to the hospital, exhibiting even stranger symptoms. As panic and rumors spread, more girls fall ill. Parents, students, the school, experts, and the health department all get involved in trying to uncover the cause of the Danvers Mystery Illness. Colleen, who's been reading The Crucible for her history sub, makes a discovery that none of the officials nor experts have come close to. Could there be supernatural elements to the sickness? Meanwhile, in 1706, a young woman named Ann Putnam tells her local reverend a strange story--when she was a teenager, she and some of her friends started the Salem witch trials. And the girls were all lying. |
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August 2017
AuthorI am Fiona, a 16-year-old person. I write reviews of books that I read. I love reading, writing, spoonerisms, word jokes, accents, In Which chapters, parentheses, long dashes, et ceteras, and acronyms. Categories
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