5.0

I loved this book! Ellis has been a life-long reader and rereader of novels, and she takes us along for a ride. It's part memoir, part literary criticism (mainly a blend of feminism and reader response but with a dash of Marxism and Freudianism at times).

Ellis herself is the daughter of imigrants/refuges from Iraq--Jewish Iraqis to be more precise. Her parents settle in London, and their history is part hers. She spends years trying to claim her own identity amid the pressures inherited from her home cultures. She moves through novels and overanalyzes them.

As a Mormon woman who overanalyzes literature myself, it was right up my ally!