The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Title: The House on Mango Street
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Number of Pages: 110 pages
My Rating: 4.5/5

This is a series of vignettes about Esperanza, a pre-teen girl growing up in a latino neighborhood in Chicago. It's very, very short, even shorter than the 110 pages it appears to be, because each story starts halfway down on the page, and often end with just one paragraph or a few lines on the next page, so there's a ton of empty space. The stories are all just little ordinary things, like reading somebody's memories rather than A Novel. I enjoyed it a lot.



Mooch from BookMooch.

'Jupiter Amidships' by ST Martin

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

'Jupiter Amidships' is a sequal to 'Jupiter Williams', which I reviewed here. This time, the arrogant young hero of Jupiter Williams finds himself press ganged into naval service, and serves on board a British naval ship around the turn of the 18th/19th century.

First of all, this is a really really good book. The characters are well drawn, Jupiter is wonderfully flawed, as ever, and the depiction of the 18th century British navy is unflinching in its accuracy. There's not a lot of romanticisation here - you see it in all its bloody brutality.

Having said that, I struggled with this book a little at times. The first book was very 'boys own' adventure, and this one even more so. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there wasn't a single female character in the book. Of course, this makes sense for a book set entirely on board a ship, but it was something that I vaguely felt the lack of. It was also a very tough book - it kept pressing on, with more and more awful things happening to the heroes and it doesn't let up very much. This isn't unreasonable, considering the context of the story, but at times I did feel a bit like I just desperately wanted to give the poor kid a break! And yet, at the end ( click for spoilers )

As in the case of the last book, I really hope there's a sequel. I think there might be. The story does definitely seem wide open for one.

#39: "Digger J Jones" by Richard Frankland

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

Digger J Jones by Richard J Frankland (Scholastic, 2007)

Richard Frankland is a well known and highly regarded playwright. This is his first novel: the diary of a Koori boy in 1967, with links to the community at Lake Condah, to the indigenous political organisations centred in Northcote (Melbourne) leading up to the May 27th referendum.

This book does - from my clueless white girl viewpoint - a marvelous job of explaining what was going on in 1967. Vietnam. The referendum. The sheer stupidity of the mere need for the referendum.

The emnity-into-friendship of Digger and Darcy is a highlight of the book: the way that they are forced, again and again, into each other's orbit. I love the involvement of the churches (historically accurate, thank you) in the whole thing: the Catholic church through Sister Ally, and the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship (I have to assume) through Digger's family. (I do wish I wasn't constantly wanting to call him "Dumby", though. It's the effect of having every Year Nine in my school studying Deadly, Unna? this year.)

It's at least as good as as Anita Heiss' Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talance, and it's great to see Frankland writing YA books. While I'm sure this has used a lot of Frankland's own life experience (like Digger, Frankland is a Gunditjmara man with links to Condah), I hope he goes on to write more.

(New tags: a: frankland richard)

#34-#38: Chang, See, Johnson, Smith, Lee

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

( Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China )

( Lisa See, Peony in Love )

( Varian Johnson, My Life as a Rhombus )

( Sherri L. Smith, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet )

( Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles )