Rena

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“I actually thought this book was amazing, but I do know some people will find it difficult to understand. This is because, the whole point is, the narrator doesn't truly understand what is happening, she is making vampiric presumptions about one of her classmates at the boarding school, and throughout the novel she and the reader are toying with the logic that vampires do not exist, whilst at the same time being taunted by the chilling evidence that one might.

Its a very weird book and is filled with paranoia, suspicion and even a sense of underlying homoerotica. The curious obsession that the author holds with Ernessa, a beautiful foreign girl, sometimes suggests she is attracted to the strange new girl and there is a definite imlplied sexual relationship between Ernessa and Lucy Blake. There is also a possible reference to race and outsiders, she talks of Ernessa having a different skin tone, which may be to show how foreigners and immigrants can be treated as suspicious by people, and in this case, even evil.

In the novel, Lucy Blake, who is the author's closest friend, is becoming increasingly ill as she has started being around Ernessa more and more. Are the two occurences connected? Is Ernessa responsible for draining the life out of Lucy? Or is the author's fevered mind creating illusions to justify the loss of her friend to the new class member? Is the author insane, paranoid, dillusional... or is Ernessa going to kill them all?

READ IT.”

Rena wrote this review Thursday, November 27 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“I, myself, am very British and I was so extremely pleased when I saw a book collaborating thousands of quotes by and about us, that I bought it immediately. I was not disappointed.

This outrageously quirky book is packed to the brim with intelligent, witty and hilarious quotes from some of the greatest Actors, Musicians, Comedians and Politicians of our time and of centuries before. I honestly didn't know we were so widely talked about. I found the book both extremely informative and riot-inducing (i.e. I laughed so much I cried) and I would reccommend it to anyone, British or not.”

Rena wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“George Orwell is one of the most intelligent and unique authors I've ever come across. His ideas are brilliant and astonishingly vivid even though his books were written decades ago. Nineteen-Eighty Four features an imagined alternate world where the Government control every move its people make. It mirrors that of the German Gestapo during the reign of Hitler; it is so far gone that even children are being tricked into handing their parents over to the authorities. And amidst all this, our quirky and slightly eccentric protagonist attempts a forbidden affair with a young woman. If they are caught, they could be tortured, killed, brainwashed or have any number of outrageously horrible things done to them; but they risk everything for what they have together. What happens to the pair? Well, you'll just have to read it and find out.”

Rena wrote this review Friday, November 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )