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. 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. Wow. Okay. I've been reading this book for a long time (like nearly two months), and so I had plenty of time to think about what I would write for this review.
I randomly picked up this book at Powell's Books in the fall. (The cover is beautiful.) I didn't get around to starting it until late February or early March, because my to-read stack is always so massive... I noticed the profusion of praise on the covers, of course, but I had no idea that Hild would be so amazing. This book isn't thick, but it's heavy--heavy not with ink and paper, I'm sure, but with the story. It's the seventh century in Britain, and a three-year old girl's childhood ends when her mother's companion, Onnen, comes into the woods where young Hild and Onnen's son Cian are playing. Onnen announces that Hild's father--Hereric, the aetheling (potential heir)--is dead. And then Hild is being groomed to be the seer of the king, Edwin, her great-uncle. For a child, she is brilliant. For a child, she has a huge amount of responsibility. One misstep, one "vision" that doesn't come true, one wrong friend, could lead to the loss of everything and everyone she loves, including her own life. Matters grow more complicated when the bishops and priests of the new Christian religion start arriving at Edwin's halls and weaving themselves in the political and religion fabric of the island. Hild is the story of the early life of Saint Hilda of Whitby, drawn from the very slim records of history and Nicola Griffith's brilliant imagination. 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. It's got a rather horrible title and the texture of the cover is shudder-inducing (it's got some weird soft coating on it). Despite these drawbacks, If You Could Be Mine is a wonderful little book, and it was about time that I read it (been sitting around since June).
Sahar and Nasrin have been in love since they were children. They're complete opposites--Sahar is quiet, studious, and steadfast, while Nasrin is popular, dramatic, and spoiled--but their love has lasted in secret for eleven years. The girls both know what the Iranian government thinks of people like them, and so they say nothing of their relationship. But when the string of Nasrin's suitors that they think of as no more than an annoyance suddenly turns into one man--one fiancee--they cannot go on as they always have. Sahar needs a way to take back her girlfriend. She finds a solution that sounds perfect--in Iran, sex reassignment surgery is encouraged for those who feel born in the wrong body. Sahar will do anything for Nasrin, even this. I read this book in a day. I never do that--at least not since second grade, when I begun to realize that I was too old for Magic Treehouse if I went through the books that fast. To be fair, I stayed up until 1:30 AM to finish Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, but perhaps that's even more impressive.
It is so hard to describe this book. The back cover sounds so dreadfully ordinary and dull, and I don't blame whoever wrote it. It's nearly impossible to do it justice without just going into detail about everything in the book. It cannot be summarized, let alone in the way that back covers do it--designed to entice, not describe. AaDDtSotU is made up of all its parts, which is what makes it so wonderful and unique. Summer of 1987 and Ari Mendoza is fifteen and miserable. For the past eleven years, his brother has been in prison and no one will talk about him, especially not his parents. Ari doesn't even know what Bernardo did. Ari's father fought in the Vietnam war before Ari was born, and he barely knows him, silent and inexpressive as he is. But when Ari, who can't swim, goes to the pool one day to float and listen to the older lifeguards say stupid and creepy things about girls, he meets Dante, whose voice is squeaky with allergies. Dante offers to teach him to swim, and Ari accepts. Dante seems so perfect and happy. He laughs all the time. He loves art and poetry and reading. He has a wonderful relationship with his parents. He gets along with everyone. He is almost the exact opposite of Ari, and yet they become friends. Neither one of them has ever really had a friend. As the summer goes by, Dante and Ari spend time together and get to know each other better each day. But one rainy evening, a terrible accident results in a hospital visit and a lot of confused feelings on all sides, changing Ari and Dante's relationship. In the course of a year, Ari and Dante learn much about each other, their families, and living. I picked up this book because of the large, loopy red font of the title. I bought it because the summary on the inside flap mentioned that soccer moms in two-ton SUVs are more dangerous than atomic bombs (and when you've created an imaginary Minnesotan soccer mom named Colleen, the type who says "mac and cheese," owns a minivan, has three "kyids," wears mom jeans, is proud of being an "Ameerikin mahm," and would most definitely be in family-aimed commercials for appliances, insurance, political campaigns, and complaints, you would be happy to read a book that might involve such a character and see what other people make of her).
Anyway, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this book, despite having had almost a week now to think over it and organize my thoughts for a review. At this point, I have decided that I most likely never will do such a thing, and so have gone ahead to throw my opinion out into the world. Billy Kinsey is 17 and he knows the epitome of meaningless. He should, living in an insanely rich California neighborhood in a house far too huge for him and his parents who don't really love each other anymore. They've lived in the house ever since Billy's dad won the lottery, 13 years ago. When he was 11, Billy's twin sister Dorie died in the hospital. She had leukemia, but Billy's bone marrow donation never had time to save her. Now, Billy begins his senior year of high school with no plans for college. He's been an insomniac since Dorie died. He has a massive store of knowledge accumulated over years of research and following interests. He drums himself into numbness in his soundproofed basement drum room. He is completely nihilistic. And then, on the first week of school, a new student shows up in his history class. The boy's name is Twom Twomey (pronounced like "tomb"). On one arm he has a barbed-wire tattoo. The other arm is covered in colorful flowers. His left hand is marked change. The right says chaos. Twom likes to go a little outlaw--following his own rules and not listening to the idiots. Twom sticks up for the downtrodden. He's kind to the fat, friendless girl who has a crush on him. He avenges the pushing-down of nerdy hacker Ephraim in the locker-room shower. Spending a night in jail is nothing to him. His lifestyle attracts jaded, miserable Billy--it's thoroughly different than anything he's ever known. Just in time for the start of school, Gretchen Quinn, Dorie's best friend, comes back from Africa, where her doctor parents were researching cures for AIDS. She thinks that she and Billy were friends, too. She's a magnificent runner. She has a perfect family, with an older brother, two little sisters, a parents who love each other. They have conversations at the dinner table, something that, to Billy, might as well be an alien practice. She's about as different from Twom as you could get, and yet Billy finds himself equally attracted to her. Ephraim, the nerdy hacker, has been avoided for years by Billy--and everyone. But, alongside the other changes of this school year, Ephraim somehow becomes part of Billy's friend circle (also a new thing for Billy). Same with Deliza, the daughter of a man who launders money for a Mexican cartel. Deliza is beautiful, popular, and has taken a fancy to Twom, which means that she ends up spending lots of time with Billy. Soon, the four friends are onto a major housebreaking operation that becomes routine. They never take anything, just break into the houses of the rich and do their separate things. Billy always sleeps. Any nightmares in these strangers' houses are not his, and he can lay down peacefully without Dorie haunting his rest. But the peace and mindlessness cannot last. Before they know what's happening, Billy, Twom, Ephraim, Deliza, and even Gretchen--who is only really involved with Billy--are spiralling down into a different kind of meaninglessness from the one they're used to, victims of their own tragic age. This is such an amazing book. Seriously, I'm going to have trouble reviewing it; it'll devolve into, "Well, it's just great, so read it!" But I read most books with the intention of reviewing them later, so I really do have some specific things to say; don't worry! I can tell you exactly why this book, which was in our basement, is so wonderful.
Sophie's World (a word I can't type for some reason, unless I mean to type "word," so please let me know if there are any mistakes I didn't catch) was originally written in Norwegian, and it made me wonder how many other great books are out there that we in America just don't have access to because they aren't translated into English. All the more reason to become multilingual! Sophie Amundsen is a very normal 14-year-old Norwegian girl. She lives with her mom (her father is almost always away at sea) and has a best friend named Joanna. But then one day, a mysterious envelope shows up in her mailbox, and inside is a slip of paper that says Who are you? on it. Not an hour later, a second letter arrives--Where does the world come from? Sophie's stumped, but there's more in store for her. A large brown envelope arrives later that day with the beginning of a course on philosophy. The anonymous correspondence continues, and Sophie quickly learns more about who her teacher is, but there are more mysteries than that. The personal belongings of a girl named Hilde--who shares Sophie's birthday--keep turning up in her world, as well as postcards to Hilde from the enigmatic girl's father, a UN major in Lebanon. And at the same time, Sophie and her philosophy teacher begin to discover that their world may be nothing like what they've always thought it to be. A Separate Peace (Written by John Knowles, Published by Scribner in 1959, 1987, and 2003)6/1/2015 We are ever so grateful for school and novel groups and such things that introduce to one books that one would ordinarily not have read. Yay!
A Separate Peace is one such book. Where would I have found it, anyway? But it happened to be one of the choices in our last round of novel groups this school year (and my last ever at my current school). The description given by my teacher wasn't too detailed, but I was intrigued, and I felt like I would like it, and so I picked it. I'm happy about that. ( : Gene Forrester goes to a Devon, a boys' boarding school in New Hampshire in World War II. He focuses on his schoolwork with the intention to do his best, but his roommate and best friend Phineas ("Finny") has very different ideas of what to do with the Summer Session. Finny is spectacular; Gene sees him as perfect. He walks so evenly, he's the best as sports, he talks smoothly, he can get himself out of any trouble, no matter how many rules he's broken. He also fails impressively at the academic side of school. But nonetheless, he is without flaws in Gene's mind; he needs nothing more to be perfect. When Finny begins to encourage the few boys remaining over that summer to jump out of this large tree and into the middle of the Devon River, the session turns deadly. Gene begins questioning his friendship with Finny, wondering how much is built on actual liking and how much on fierce competition. One day, Gene and Finny are about to do a double jump out of the tree when a blind impulse seizes Gene. Finny ends up with a broken leg, but more than his limb is shattered. This accident changes the entire lives of these two boys and, to a degree, their classmates' lives change as well. Amid the crazy world of 1942 and 1943, teenage boys learn about living and living together. |
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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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