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. 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. 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. 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. 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. My, my, it's been a month since I posted my last review! How incredible! Since this is a short book, this'll be a short review, with good and bad meshed together. Sorry if that bothers you.
I enjoy map books quite a lot, and though it's a much different type of book than On the Map, my favorite map book that I've come across and which I read too far before starting IWMCW to review it here, I liked Lost States. Lost States is an alphabetized collection of failed US states with interesting backstories. A lot of them occur in the 1800s, which isn't that surprising, but some of them were attempts made before independence, or as recent as the early 2000s. From Absaroka to Yucatan, Lost States gives details on bits of land that almost became US states, some of them bits of other, existing states, and some of them bits (or wholes) of other countries. |
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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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