Everything about V.M. Straka — even his true identity — is a mystery. His final novel, The Ship of Theseus, is filled with indecipherable codes and clues to the author’s identity and his actions of revolution against dictatorial governments. Disgraced graduate student Eric has read Straka’s novel multiple times since age 15, and still feels…
Tag: modes of storytelling
Review: The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet
It’s been a Pride and Prejudice retelling kind of month. First it was Jo Baker’s Longbourn, and now it’s a modernization. Well, actually it’s an adaptation of a modernization. Let me ‘splain. Meet Lizzie Bennet, Californian grad student embarking on a vlog for her final project. I stumbled upon this amazing web series soon after…
Review: Wonderstruck
“Sooner or later, the lightning comes to us all.” Thus begins Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck, a novel following two children wishing for happier lives. At first their stories seem disconnected; Rose lives in New Jersey in 1927, Ben 50 years later in Minnesota. But when both children decide to head to New York a timeline swings…
“If you take a book with you on a journey…an odd thing happens.”
I’ve kept a commonplace book for over a decade, occasionally adding in snippets, quotes, or sayings that appeal to me. After adding a fresh piece of advice the other day (“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”) I glanced back through other recent entries and landed on this…
Revisiting a Childhood Favorite
I grew up reading Prudence Mackintosh’s Thundering Sneakers, a chronicle of a young mother raising three sons in the 1970s and 1980s. The stories are laugh-out-loud funny, and they merit re-reading (even if some of the references have become dated). Recently I received copies of Sneaking Out and Just As We Were: A Narrow Slice…