Sunday, March 20, 2005
Books Read This Past Month
The Time Travelers Wife - A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.
The annunciation of Francesca Dunn by Hallowell, Janis Francesca Dunn, struggling like any teenager to find her place in the world, is seen by a homeless man, Chester, who suddenly has a vision of her as the Holy Virgin. When he sees her helping out at a local cafe, he falls to his knees before her. Chester, either insane or a visionary, spreads the word of her holiness and crowds come to offer devotion to her. Francesca's mother, a scientist and disbeliever, tries to shield her from it all and get her psychotherapy. Others offer Francesca their aid or seek to profit from her celebrity. Francesca gets caught up in the frenzy and begins to wonder if the adoration was really meant for her.
The Virgin Blue - deals with two women living centuries apart but linked by common memories and feelings. Isabelle du Mourin is a sixteenth-century housewife who, along with her husband and children, must flee her hometown in France to seek religious freedom in Switzerland. Ella Turner (Tournier) is an American midwife who has recently moved to southern France with her architect husband Rick. Upon moving to France, Ella decides to trace her family history. Armed with nothing more than the address of a distant relative in Switzerland, she begins her quest to find out where she came from. The closer she gets to the truth, the more her search is hampered by nightmares of a loud noise and the color blue - memories that her distant relative Isabelle lived with four hundred years earlier. Softly written and vividly realistic, "The Virgin Blue" questions who we all are, and what it is that haunts our dreams. It is the quest of two women to find their identity and destiny, regardless of their circumstances.
The annunciation of Francesca Dunn by Hallowell, Janis Francesca Dunn, struggling like any teenager to find her place in the world, is seen by a homeless man, Chester, who suddenly has a vision of her as the Holy Virgin. When he sees her helping out at a local cafe, he falls to his knees before her. Chester, either insane or a visionary, spreads the word of her holiness and crowds come to offer devotion to her. Francesca's mother, a scientist and disbeliever, tries to shield her from it all and get her psychotherapy. Others offer Francesca their aid or seek to profit from her celebrity. Francesca gets caught up in the frenzy and begins to wonder if the adoration was really meant for her.
The Virgin Blue - deals with two women living centuries apart but linked by common memories and feelings. Isabelle du Mourin is a sixteenth-century housewife who, along with her husband and children, must flee her hometown in France to seek religious freedom in Switzerland. Ella Turner (Tournier) is an American midwife who has recently moved to southern France with her architect husband Rick. Upon moving to France, Ella decides to trace her family history. Armed with nothing more than the address of a distant relative in Switzerland, she begins her quest to find out where she came from. The closer she gets to the truth, the more her search is hampered by nightmares of a loud noise and the color blue - memories that her distant relative Isabelle lived with four hundred years earlier. Softly written and vividly realistic, "The Virgin Blue" questions who we all are, and what it is that haunts our dreams. It is the quest of two women to find their identity and destiny, regardless of their circumstances.
# posted by Gina @ 9:05 AM 
