Swimmers By Julie Otsuka

 

Swimmers

By Julie Otsuka

 4 stars.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Image
  The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton One of my favorite book tropes is the adolescent or pre-adolescent boy with psychological or social trauma and self-discovery. Some of my favorite books involve this theme: Catcher in the Rye , I Know This Much is True , and The Perks of Being a Wallflower , to name a few. The Outsiders is another book that carries this theme, following Ponyboy Curtis and a gang of greasers in the mid-20th century. Ponyboy and his two brothers navigate a world of delinquency and violence, though the three of them are smart and savvy in there own ways. The greasers and the socs have turf wars and throughout the story Ponyboy discovers that even though the two groups are very different, they are both beset by there own problems, both societal and psychological, and that they can be taken down by the prejudices of their respective social groups. After a tragic incident involving Ponyboy, his friend Johnny, and two socs, Ponyboy and Johnny go on the run to escape a murde...
Read more

Beneath the Scarlet Sky By Mark Sullivan

Image
  Beneath the Scarlet Sky By Mark Sullivan This story follows Pino Lella, an Italian teenager, who becomes enmeshed in World War II when he is enlisted as the driver for a high ranking German official. Pino is sent to a mountain getaway/school by his parents in order to keep him safe when the bombing reaches his Italian city. There, he helps to get Jews across the border to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Afterward, when he returns home and is at the age of enlistment to be drafted into the war effort, he is noticed by General Leyers, who asks for Pino to become his driver, taking him around Italy to various appointments and battle positions. Pino saves Leyers's life a couple times, even though Pino himself is against the Nazis and is working undercover as a spy, relaying information to his uncle who is part of the resistance movement. Throughout the story Pino is forming a romantic relationship with Anna, who is the maid to Leyers's mistress, and a woman he asked out on a dat...
Read more

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Image
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara This is a beautifully written and thoughtful exploration of friendship, love, and loss, and how the trauma of youth never really leaves you. I'm unsure why the author has received so much backlash for the writing of this story, which I see myself reflected in so much. Never did I feel manipulated into feeling a particular way; isn't that what fiction writing is supposed to do anyway? There is also the matter of readers having such strong reactions to this book, some having cried and others revulsed by the graphic depictions of violence. In full disclosure, I only felt visceral reactions twice while reading A Little Life : the first with the scene of violence with Caleb, which I admit was difficult to get through; the second the end of the story where we find out what happened to Jude, but more than what happened to him, Harold's feelings about it, especially on the last two pages. I felt deeply in touch with this book, as if my own experie...
Read more