Lesley W

• Rated 3 stars

“Series of short stories illustrating well known Bible stories, (Adam and Even, Noah, the Tower of Babel, etc,) with a decidedly modern slant. Using the framing device of a young Jewish boy recalling his father's outlandish and frequently unsatisfactory explanations, (David used a sling because it showed more pizzazz than a mundane stabbing), Goldstein ponders timeless questions of ethics and responsibility, often inverting the traditional view of good and bad guys. Would you stay inside the Ark if you heard the desperate voices of friends and neighbors calling out for help? Did Delilah perhaps have her reasons for taking down Samson? And why can't a decent Golden Calf salesman catch a break? Funny, thought provoking and often poignant.”

Lesley W wrote this review Friday, March 29, 2013. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“As a mother who has worked hard to shield my daughter from the pernicious and omnipresent Disney, Miley, et al., I couldn't wait to read this. Orenstein makes some great points: that while girls and boys feel a strong need to express their gender identity when little, that identity need not be as hyper-sexualized and limiting as that based on Disney imagery; that gender based imaginative play is healthy, but play based on the rigid scripts of movies and tv shows is more limiting and less creative; and that media "princess" "girrrl" and "girlz" culture icons send conflicting messages about female sexuality: be innocent, yet desirable. While she may overreach occasionally, this is a thoughtful well argued cultural critique that any parent of a daughter should consider before buying into the Disney Princess juggernaut.”

Lesley W wrote this review Saturday, July 7, 2012. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 1 stars

“Just bloody awful. I have nothing against improbable romances, but I detest stories that rely on the heroine's stupidity. It galls even more when of the imbecilic heroines is the Divine Jane.”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“Yet another re-telling of a famous story from the point of view of a secondary character. Interesting to compare this with Updike's Gertrude and Claudius. There seem to be a whole slew of YA novels that reimagine female characters from classic stories, typically with a more feminist tilt: Lady Macbeth and Juliet have received similar treatments. It doesn't work with Ophelia though; the feisty grrrrlll power heroine of this novel is just too different from Shakespeare's passive victim. It' not a bad story, it just has nothing to do with Hamlet.”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Which family members did Richard III bump off again? Which Henry gave that pep talk on some battlefield about all the grunts being his brothers? If you find yourself wishing that the parents of all those Henrys and Margarets and Johns and Edwards had picked more distinctive names for their kids, then this book is for you. Each chapter gives a readable overview of the key events of a monarch's reign; then outlines the plot of the corresponding plays. Norwich helpfully points out where the plays diverge from the reality.”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“see my blog post at http://evanstonpubliclibrary.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/marcia-marcia-marcia-and-alice-alice-alice/

What do you do when the whole world wants you to stay a child forever? When your juvenile self is more real and lovable to everyone you meet than the adult you?

Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the "real life" inspiration for Alice in Wonderland would have been a remarkable woman even had she never met a peculiar mathematics don named Charles Dodgson. As the daughter of the brilliant dean of Oxford’s Christ Church college and his socially ambitious wife, she studied art with John Ruskin, flirted with the sons of Queen Victoria, and was photographed memorably by Julia Margaret Cameron. Her long lifetime encompassed the cataclysmic shifts in English society brought on by the industrial revolution and World War I.

Yet despite her rich, emotionally varied life, Alice Liddell, the keen-eyed belle of Oxford, later Mrs Reginald Hargreaves, a country gentleman’s lady, could never escape the long shadow of her childhood relationship with Charles Dodgson. In Melanie Benjamin’s vivid re-imagining of her story, “Alice” and its author played an unwanted role in much of her later life, and may even have lost the real Alice her one true love.

“Oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is–only I do get tired!”, wrote the 80 year old Hargreaves to her son in 1932. She had just been feted in New York with an honorary doctorate of letters, and had sold the original manuscript of “Alice” for a record breaking sum. Yet her celebrity inevitably leads to disappointment, “the disappointment, brief and politely suppressed in all the faces…of looking for a bright little girl in a starched white pinafore and finding an old lady instead”. Alice, “immortalized in print not merely as a little girl but rather as the embodiment of Childhood itself” is forever, “confronted by people who ask, always so very eagerly to see ‘The real Alice”‘ and who cannot hide the shock, the disbelief that the real Alice has not been able to stop time.”

Stop time? No. Yet “Alice" achieved an unwitting immortality, a “looking glass” Dorian Gray immortality. And like that eternally beautiful, eternally worshipped youth, she was never able to completely sever an immutable image from her real life.
”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I remember reading an episode from this book, "At the Burns-Cooper's" in my 8th grade short story anthology and being profoundly affected by it. The problem, however is that while Brooks was a brilliant poet and short story writer, her work does not hang together as a novel. This reminds me of a similar, ethnically-oppressed-minority-girl-in-the-city classic,Sandra Cisneros' _The House on Mango Street_.Both contain beautiful, heart breaking imagery, and vivid characters, but neither has any kind of story arc. Both seem written as "ghetto tourism": brief vignettes of inner city life designed to shock the middle class.”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I saw the movie recently, which perfectly captures the chilly isolation and alienation of the book. It left out a few things though; the murders are more numerous and a bit more grisly than on screen, and the characters more complex. Even the bullies who torment Oskar have more facets to them than the one dimensional villains in the film.

This makes for provocative social commentary on modern day (actually early 80s) Scandinavian life. The novel is really a story of 5 extremely dysfunctional family groups, and alcoholism plays a major role in almost all of them. (Significantly, the vampire "family" is the only one without a drunk or two).

Lacke, the well-meaning but befuddled friend of two vampire victims muses, "This is Sweden. Carry out a chair and put it on the sidewalk. Sit there in that chair and wait. If you wait long enough someone will come out and give you money". If you wanted a biting, Republican critique of the welfare state, you couldn't do better. Is Lindqvist suggesting that vampires are not the _only_ parasites draining the nation's lifeblood? Hmmm.”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 3 stars

“It's been a while since I have so much fun reading a new book! The prolific Meg Cabot, (my daughter was reading the _Allie Finkle_ series while I read this) has come up with a funny, yet inspiring take on the Arthurian legends. Ellie, (real name Elaine), the offspring of two medieval obsessed professors, has just transferred to the title high school, where she meets a trio of popular kids: hot shot football star Lance, golden girl cheerleader Jennifer, and the mysterious, too-good-to-be-true A. William Wagner: class president, star quarterback. natural leader and heroic protector of nerds and other outcasts. Why, Ellie wonders, does she feel she's met them all before?

Although anyone who's ever seen _Camelot_ will guess "Will's" real name and destiny long before Ellie does, Cabot provides a couple of twists on the legend you won't see coming. Hint: Ellie's affinity for water and floating are significant, but not in the way everyone thinks. ”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Claims to debunk the received mythology of Charles Dodgson as a sexually immature pedophile haunted by his love for a 10 year old girl. Makes some good points about Dodgson's overlooked attraction to adult women, and the need to view the Dodgson/Alice relationship within the context of the Victorian cult of the girl child, but Leach's attempts to explain away his wistful poems about Alice are unconvincing. ”

Lesley W wrote this review Tuesday, June 15, 2010. ( reply | permalink )