Category: Book Review

Craig Silvey’s Australian novel Jasper Jones stresses the importance of truth and justice in formulating human experiences, shaping understandings of oneself and world. It highlights that events aren’t always positive; justice isn’t dealt out fairly, and truth can be a burden. Silvey suggests that people’s response to a disclosed truth can empower or diminish their…

Dave Eggers utilizes unusual formatting tactics to present his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, including a lengthy introduction and acknowledgements section, inauthentic dialogue, personal commentary, and even an unconventional copyright page. The deviation from expected norms in the memoir genre can be seeded out even through the tone of Eggers-as-narrator. While the book…

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is an innovative and intellectual young adult novel released in 2011. This sci-fi story recounts the quest of an ordinary teenager named Wade Watts who relies on an extremely advanced virtual world, OASIS, to live out most of his life: he attends school, hangs out with friends, and entertains himself…

Archetypes are an important foundation for building literary work. As “reoccurring patterns, images, or descriptive details” (Crisp 2), they not only define the identity of an author’s characters, but the course of the plot, the journeys and the tragedies. Archetypes are utilized as a useful tool in order to convey the author’s beliefs as well…

In Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time, the author brings out the irony surrounding various characters with Pechorin being at the center stage. The portrayal of Pechorin is viewed in the book as an exemplary Byronic anti-hero and Lermontov describes him as a typical man of his age. The author creates a hero…

Explore the ways in which two short stories vividly create tension and atmosphere Authors Charles Dickens and Ray Bradbury vividly create tension and atmosphere using several key literary devices. In the short story “The Signalman” Charles Dickens creates a sense of foreboding by slowly describing events and the setting in vivid detail. Ray Bradbury’s story…

The book Gender of the Gift by the Marilyn Strathern is a detailed evaluation of the problems faced by women and the society at large in Melanesia. The study mainly focuses on the native’s culture with the guinea mead’s field report as the center of interest. The report encompasses mead’s adolescence and sexual traits. The…

As one may look into a mirror, the reflections that they see may vary. For Dana Franklin in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), she sees her long lost ancestor Alice Greenwood. The story tells the tale of Dana, a young black woman in the 70’s, and her husband Kevin, a young white author, as they travel…

From his childhood in Gaza to achievements in the medical field, Izzeldin Abuelaish has a unique life story. Against the odds, which included poverty, refugee camps, isolation and discrimination, he still managed to become the first Palestinian doctor to practice in Israel. Unfortunately, it would be the tragic death of his daughters that propelled him…

In Americo Paredes’s novel “George Washington Gomez,” the main character George Washington “Gualinto” Gomez is a young Mexican-American man, growing up in Jonesville-on-the-Grande, Texas. As the novel chronicles his journey to adulthood in early 1900’s Texas, the historical backdrop provides various trials and tribulations for Gualinto that shape his identity and perspective on life. Pressured…