50bookchallenge, 15000pages
Book #1 -- Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, 812 pages.
Ok, I've been working on this one since Thanksgiving. It's a great book in most places, but it's about 300 pages too long. Basically it's the memoirs of a bookish and deeply spiritual young woman covering the period from age 15 through the birth of her first child at age 19, interspersed with poems and journal entries from the time period covered, written for her unborn daughter. It is at times hysterically funny and at others deeply moving. This is one of the best teenage girl *voices* I've read in a long time, although perhaps I feel that way because she reminds me of me at that age. Although I was without her myriad experiences - another thing that doesn't quite work about the book. I could see each of the individual major events happening to someone, but all of them happening to the same person in so short a time seems unrealistic.
The book is, apparently, the last in a series of loosely connected novels, but I haven't read the others. I can bear witness for the author's statement that each stands on its own, as I wouldn't have known there were others had I not read so in the afterward.
The one thing I really *didn't* like about this book was the ending. You read the whole book in Cordelia's voice, ending with the hopeful message to the daughter she expects to give birth to the next day. Then you turn the page and find the final section - written by her lover, husband, and father of her child, Will Blacklin, and also addressed to their daughter. It is Will's contribution to and explanation of the full body of work preceding, given to the daughter for whom those pages are all she really has of the mother she has never known. From Will, we find out that Cordelia died only months after her daughter was born. While I can understand, in a sense, what the author was trying to do, for me, this section practically negates everything before it. All the experiences, the ideas Cordelia expresses, her plans, her exploration of herself -- to me they held meaning predominantly in terms of what they meant to her future -- a future she never had. I was left feeling bereft and hopeless -- what was the point of all that learning and self-exploration, all that girl-becoming-woman we just read, if she was cut down before she could truly mature? Probably not the feeling the author was going for, but what I got nonetheless. I'm sure the book was meant to be inspiring, but all I got from it was "Life's shit, and just when you think you're getting somewhere, you die."
Progress toward goals: 12/365 = 3.3%
Books: 1/100 = 1.0%
Pages: 812/30000 = 2.7%
2009 Book List
cross-posted to 15000pages, 50bookchallenge, and gwynraven
Ok, I've been working on this one since Thanksgiving. It's a great book in most places, but it's about 300 pages too long. Basically it's the memoirs of a bookish and deeply spiritual young woman covering the period from age 15 through the birth of her first child at age 19, interspersed with poems and journal entries from the time period covered, written for her unborn daughter. It is at times hysterically funny and at others deeply moving. This is one of the best teenage girl *voices* I've read in a long time, although perhaps I feel that way because she reminds me of me at that age. Although I was without her myriad experiences - another thing that doesn't quite work about the book. I could see each of the individual major events happening to someone, but all of them happening to the same person in so short a time seems unrealistic.
The book is, apparently, the last in a series of loosely connected novels, but I haven't read the others. I can bear witness for the author's statement that each stands on its own, as I wouldn't have known there were others had I not read so in the afterward.
The one thing I really *didn't* like about this book was the ending. You read the whole book in Cordelia's voice, ending with the hopeful message to the daughter she expects to give birth to the next day. Then you turn the page and find the final section - written by her lover, husband, and father of her child, Will Blacklin, and also addressed to their daughter. It is Will's contribution to and explanation of the full body of work preceding, given to the daughter for whom those pages are all she really has of the mother she has never known. From Will, we find out that Cordelia died only months after her daughter was born. While I can understand, in a sense, what the author was trying to do, for me, this section practically negates everything before it. All the experiences, the ideas Cordelia expresses, her plans, her exploration of herself -- to me they held meaning predominantly in terms of what they meant to her future -- a future she never had. I was left feeling bereft and hopeless -- what was the point of all that learning and self-exploration, all that girl-becoming-woman we just read, if she was cut down before she could truly mature? Probably not the feeling the author was going for, but what I got nonetheless. I'm sure the book was meant to be inspiring, but all I got from it was "Life's shit, and just when you think you're getting somewhere, you die."
Progress toward goals: 12/365 = 3.3%
Books: 1/100 = 1.0%
Pages: 812/30000 = 2.7%
2009 Book List
cross-posted to 15000pages, 50bookchallenge, and gwynraven