Tagged with books

Bringing together the two 12-year-old oddballs at Summer Science Camp, Ashley and Tiana is about the relationship between a middle class punk Jewish girl from Greenwich Village and a working class African-American hip hopper from the Bronx. (Is "hip hopper" correct? Should I have said "hip hop fan"? "Hip hop aficionado"?)

I almost put this book down because I disliked the opening so much, but I persevered. When possible, I try to stick with Nancy Pearl's recommendation that you give the book 50 pages to convince you. Plus it was the only book I had at Eric's place, so I had to either give it more of a shot or brave the cool, wet June weather and walk the two blocks to my house for a better selection.

What I didn't like in the beginning was how childishly de Rosnay portrayed a child, but that got better as soon as the kid broke out of the Vel' d'Hiv, thus avoiding death at Auschwitz. That sort of thing matures a ten-year-old fast, and even the person writing her life has to respect that.

By page 40 or so, the story, which is told alternately in the third person about the ten-year-old (Sarah) and from the first person point of view of an American expatriate (Julia) living in Paris with her French husband and daughter, gets pretty compelling.

As I've been saying, I've been having a hard time getting into serious literature lately, and so, being on vacation and all, I decided to embrace my love of vampire books and young adult fiction and dig into the Blue Bloods series by Melissa De La Cruz, a Philippines native now living in NY and LA.

Because I've been reading such crap lately, I sort of forced myself to finish this literary novel even though I wasn't enjoying it so much. It's actually quite poetically written; it just didn't grab me. The narrator is a pre-teen with an angry older sister, a fucked up veteran father, and a mother who doesn't have much of a presence in their lives. They've also got a dog that keeps getting knocked up and a bunny with no tail. That's all I've got to say about the book. Sorry.