Reading Challenge 2016: AprilBooks set outside of the U.S. She Weeps Each Time You’re Bor
Reading Challenge 2016: AprilBooks set outside of the U.S. She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan BarryThis book spans the history of Vietnam through the second half of the twentieth century. It’s one of those novels that tells a larger story by honing in on a single village, or rather a single family group as they’re displaced. There are a couple of mythical elements that highlight the occasional surrealness, and dreamlike uprootedness of that time period in that region. There is a real conversation with superstition and the supernatural – Rabbit who lost her parents and hears the stories of the dead, and Qui who loses her baby and never stops nursing. The landscapes are incredibly evocative, the novel infused with strength and beauty and hardship. True confessions: I picked it up because of its stunning cover. If You Could Be Mine by Sara FarizanA coming of age story about two best friends in Iran. They’ve loved each other since they were very young, but when they hit adolescence, everything changes. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran, so when one of them is guided into an arranged marriage, the other one considers what she sees as her only option: posing as a transgendered person and going through sexual reassignment surgery. Although I wasn’t convinced by parts of it, I thought it did a good job of conveying the limited thinking of a teenager who has limited options and is straining against their confines every single day.The 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Philippe BlondelA novella of reminiscence, of looking back on young love and heartbreak, and of wondering what might have been. The two characters had a brief tryst in their early twenties that ended poorly after a disasterous trip to London. Now, they find themselves sitting next to each other on an early morning train to Paris. Will they recognize each other? Will they say anything? The chapters alternate between their interior monologues, how everything affected them then (or didn’t), and where they are now. Quite well done in the limited space, an hour and a half on the train…Also read: The Red Parts by Maggie NelsonHamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter -- source link
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