Worderella Writes

Book: Arranged Marriage

A powerful, eye-opening, easy to read set of thoughtful short stories set in India and the USA about the lives and loves of Indian women in the world.

This is a powerful testament to Divakaruni’s talent as a poet and prose writer. The excerpt above shows how powerful her writing is; my theory is because she was a poet first and then turned to prose. You can tell how carefully she picks each word, how she puts them together to get just the effect she’s looking for.

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Book: The Time-Traveler’s Wife

This is the story of Clare and Henry. Henry time-travels, but not because he wants to, and he has no control of when or where he may end up, or how long he will be there. Clare, like the rest of us, lives each day, in and out, with none of the hiccups that Henry suffers from, and with the task of waiting for Henry to come back.

This book has been on my To Be Read list since I first heard about it early last year. This book is tragic. And beautiful. For once, a story told from two perspectives where it was the right choice to make. I don’t even know how to talk about this book, really, seeing how I just finished it.

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Book: Evening

Ann Grant Lord is dying. As she lays in bed drifting in and out of consciousness, memories of a long-forgotten love affair are triggered by the smell of a balsam pillow.

The text has a certain poetry to it, once you get used to its peculiarity. For instance: there are no double-quote marks denoting speech.

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Book: Never Let Me Go

Kathy grew up in the sheltered, English countryside at the Hailsham boarding school, where the students were raised to believe they were special. Only in her teens does Hailsham reveal how special the students are. Kathy’s narrative slowly reveals from hindsight how a simple deception defines her life.

This story is intense, subtle, delicate. Its characters are flawed, obsessively so. The overlying plot is science fiction, but without the hopeful ending we expect from genre fiction. If you liked Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I did, then you will definitely like this book.

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Book: The Extra-Large Medium

Annie always thought chocolate brown was the new black, because everyone was wearing it. It didn’t take long for her to realize that no one else saw these people wearing all-brown outfits, and that these people happened to be dead. As a grown-up, Annie begins to treat her habit of finishing the ghostly “unfinished business” as a job; it is when her husband disappears and doesn’t return to her, wearing brown, telling her his unfinished business, that things become seriously wrong.

If you think perhaps this book has a theme similar to The Sixth Sense, that’s what I thought too. Except instead of being a thriller of sorts, this book is insightful and humorous, with a succinct tone that doesn’t forgive any character and yet makes you feel for them nonetheless. At its heart, this book is about a woman who loses her husband and waits, against her will, for the day she has to legally declare him dead.

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Book: The Moon is Down

Written during the height of Nazi Germany’s power, this book is about the invasion and betrayal of a small European town. A mechanized army, working on a time table and having no concept of defeat, walks into the town and takes control with little-to-no conflict. This book shares the events that happens after the takeover.

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Book: St. Ursula’s Girls Against the Atomic Bomb

So. This book is interesting. St Ursula’s Girls Against the Atomic Bomb by Valerie Hurley is about Raine Rassaby, a free-spirited high school girl who is determined to be a heroine and save the world from nuclear missiles and other dangerous horrible things like the military. Her mother is a concert violinist and her father is a famous astrologist; her late grandmother converted to Judaism so she thinks she’s Jewish even though both of her parents are Catholic. She’s in love with the Slovakian Jewish gardener, and her Catholic school guidance teacher, who has his own problems, lives next door. The book starts crazy, and it doesn’t seem to come to any sort of real resolution, in the way that a typical romance would, which is why I’ve labeled this book as simply fiction, it almost asks to be literary fiction.

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Book: A Hole in the Earth

A Hole in the Earth by Robert Bausch is a first-person narrative about “the summer” as described by Henry Porter, the narrator and main character. A middle school history teacher with a penchant for gambling, Porter is a divorce who has not seen his daughter Nicole in five years, which makes her about seventeen. The school year has just ended, and Porter is on his way out the door to the race track to make a couple bucks when Nicole shows up at his door with her friend, Sam. That same day, Porter’s girlfriend of three years Elizabeth begins to act strangely, and she soon reveals that she is pregnant. What starts out as a series of unexpected events leads to the inner-workings of a quiet man; Porter’s narrative tells us everything he cannot or does not say, and how that can make or break his relationships with the people around him.

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Book: Chasing Shakespeares

If you like any sort of research-based/mystery-type fiction, this book might be for you. Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith is the story about a graduate student from Northeastern University who finds what he thinks is a letter written by THE William Shakespeare. In his search to prove Shakespeare wrote it, Joe Roper gets involved with the Oxfordians, a group of people who believe the Earl of Oxford was the real William Shakespeare.

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