Page Twenty

Atonement by Ian McEwan

The book begins in 1935, England. 13-year old Briony Tallis has a very vivid imagination, which is revealed in the short plays she writes to perform for her family. Briony reads a letter meant for her older sister, Cecilia, from Robbie, the son of the Tallis' servant, and also witnesses an encounter between the two of them. Her overactive imagination and misunderstanding of the situation sets in motion an accusation that unravels the Tallis family and changes the lives of everyone involved. The book moves forward five years into WWII, and then jumps ahead to 1999 briefly at the novel's conclusion.

This book is a nice challenge, because, to me, it is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's writing. But readers beware: this book is also completely heartbreaking.

Page Nineteen

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

This book follows the life of Aminata Diallo. It begins in her small village in West Africa when she was abducted at age 11 and forced to walk for months, naked and in a coffle, to a slave ship bound for the US. She is sold as a slave to an owner of an indigo plantation in South Carolina. The book follows her life from there to Charles Town, to New York, to Nova Scotia - as she becomes one of the many black Loyalists whose name was penned in The Book of Negroes - to Sierra Leone on the back-to-Africa exodus, and finally to London.

A must read for any lover of historical fiction.

Page Eighteen

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read Hosseini's The Kite Runner a couple of years ago; it was a very powerful book. When I heard his new novel was released this year, I knew I had to read it. A Thousand Splendid Suns may not deliver the same "literary punch" as The Kite Runner, but it's definately a book that will give you pause. This book deals with the women of Afghanistan and what they had to endure living under Taliban rule. Reading about what these women had to endure makes me feel an overwhelming sense of appreciation for having been spared a life of such unspeakable attrocities. I feel sick to my stomach even thinking that people lived and are living with anything even close to what the two protagonists of this novel had to live with. On the other hand, I think the past several years have made Afghanistan out to be a place solely of war, death, and tyranny, but Hosseini also draws attention to the fact that it was, and can be, a lovely place.

This is a sad read, but there are many moments of triumph and beauty as well.

Page Seventeen

Smoke by Elizabeth Ruth

This books grabs you from the first paragraph where Ruth describes how Buster, the main protagonist of the story, drops a lit match while in bed and catches on fire as his parents try to save him. The book chronicles Buster's emotional recovery from the incident as he has to learn how to rejoin his small Southern Ontario community as someone phyically different. To help him, he has the support of the elderly town doctor, Dr. Gray, a man who spins yarns about the Purple Gang from the 1930s in order to keep Buster focussed on something other than his physical scars and emotional detachment. It was during these excerpts where Ruth lost me a bit, but the main plot of the story reads fairly smooth and she gives you quite the interesting revelation at the end of the book.

This book was the "One Book, One Community" read for this summer. Currently, the author is traveling around Southern Ontario and I will have the chance to chat with her next week.

Page Sixteen

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

This story is written from the perspective of Christopher, a 15-year old boy who has Asperger's Syndrome. Christopher loves Sherlock Holmes, and so when he finds a garden fork stuck into Wellington, his neighbour's dog, he decides to solve the mystery and write a book about it. His investigation leads him to solve many other mysteries that pertain to his family, and leads him on the biggest journey of his life thus far.
This is the second time I have read this book. The first time I read it I didn't really like it, and this second time around I appreciated it much more (maybe because I have to teach it soon), although I still got a bit glassy-eyed when Christopher went into his many mathematical digressions. I won't pretend I know a great deal about Asperger's, so I'm not sure if Haddon did the description of a boy with Asperger's justice or not, but I like the book because it will allow students to get inside the head of a new kind of hero, and attempt to empathize with someone their age who has a disability, and also to empathize with parents of children with Asperger's.

Page Fifteen

Blindness by Jose Saramago

A man at a red light suddenly goes blind, and soon so do others. The blind and the contaminated are taken to an old mental asylum and guarded by soliders who shoot them if they try to leave. Inside the asylum, as more and more people arrive, a small group of people band together and try to survive starvation, living amongst disease, filth, excrement, rape, and violence. Only one woman's sight remains intact. Lying to the authorities in order to remain with her husband, she becomes the eyes of the reader and a witness to the horrors that have befallen her unnamed city. She also becomes the eyes of the seven people who have banded together during this terrible catastrophe, and leads them throughout the city streets after the asylum catches on fire. It becomes apparant that everyone in the city and, likely, country has gone blind. As they travel through the city scavenging for shelter and food, they pass sights that become more horrifying than those in the asylum, one hell being replaced by another.
Similar to We Need to Talk about Kevin, this book is not for the faint of heart. It is also challenging because Saramago does not use any punctuation when people are speaking, and prose often runs on without stopping. While I started to get a little impatient for the novel to wrap up near the end, I do think it is definately a book that will hold your attention and keep you thinking long after you've finished it.
"Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be as they truly are, said the doctor, And what about people, asked the girl with the dark glasses, People, too, no one will be there to see them" (114).
"Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (292).

Page Fourteen

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

I would never have picked this book up had I not read many reviews that praised this book. Even my own librarian said to me "Ooh, you're going to like this one!" when I went to pick it up. Classified as a "ghost story," or "mystery," or "a return to a rich vein of storytelling we loved as children," the book tells the tale of Margaret Lea, a young woman who works with her father in their antiquarian bookshop, who is asked to write the biography of a famous Yorkshire writer, Vida Winter. Winter's books are eaten up like today's Harry Potter series, and yet no one has ever been able to get the true account of Winter's life. Now, at the end of her life, frail and dying, Winter finally reveals her story.

I suppose I would agree that the book reads like an "old fashioned story," and that it is indeed a mystery (a genre which I rarely, if ever, read). However, I had high hopes for this book which were not fully met. In fact, I found the story a bit forced and a bit of a letdown to be honest. Setterfield's main contentions centering on the separation of twins and "twin-ness" became a bit annoying. In the end, merely "mildy entertaining."