ranam's reviews
79 reviews

The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier

adventurous challenging dark hopeful mysterious sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

This book is sci-fi and takes place partly in the twentieth-century and partly in the past 600 years earlier. I liked that it seemed possible to travel in time by the way it's described in an erudite fashion so that laymen in the book as well as the reader himself understand it.

Something having to do with memory inherited from past ancestry allowing the subject of the experiment to travel to the past to the times of his ancestors. 

The ending was somewhat worth the tedium of the good portion of the book.  It was symbolic of the failure and incapacity of the main character to live in the past instead of the present without serious repercussions not just emotional.

Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier

adventurous challenging dark hopeful medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

The heroine of this book reminds me of Kate Chopin's in The Awakening . She's not really likeable and she is selfish. She takes her kids with her to the country to get away from London high society and leaves them in the care of a nanny while she cavorts with a pirate, adventures on the high seas ensuing. She dresses like a man to aid her lover in his plans to get away with his piracy. She's his cabin boy. The theme is escape: to escape the stifling constraints of females in urban society to find freedom in the countryside and fulfill the longings of her suffocated soul. The ending I think brings the plot to a respectable conclusion not withstanding Dona's recklessness. She does something cruel to a minor character at the end which left a bad taste in my mouth. One last point: I did not get the dynamics of their positions when they are fantasizing about or having sex.  It took away from my enjoyment of the plot.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

dark emotional sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.5

Even though Conrad was labeled a "bloody racist" because of this book,  I think it's important to understand that  not only is it worthy of staying in the literary canon as a relic of a lost time and place -- the bloody,  cruel genocide and enslavement of the natives of Congo--it is also invaluable as an indictment against slavery and colonization  by someone who is racist himself calling the native people that wel  known racial epithet. Yet as he repudiates the practice of slavery and the persecution of the natives, describing and descring the toils and treatment of them, he is also one of the victimizers. That's all.  I don't think there's any story or work out there about slavery or colonization that has this dichotomous quality.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 حق العودة هى اساس المحنة الفلسطينية. . .   هم للوطن و الوطن  لهم. اكبركذبة ان فلسطين 
كانت ارض بدون ناس لناس،بدون ارض. 


تماثل مع الشخصية الرئيسية في هذا الكتاب. والدي   كانو لاجئين من جيل اطفال النكبة.

كل  هذا دعاية مغرضة و كاذيبة

Monster by Walter Dean Myers

This novel really resonated with me. The main character is imprisoned for a crime he never committed. At the end he wonders how other members of society see him. 

"What do they see?"

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

In one of the last pages left there was a vampire moment between the heroine and her former house maid that made me drop my rating of this book by one point. It was just too  nasty. 

The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No

3.5

This book has three sections.  The first,  age of discretion,  was the least memorable one. It is about a woman writer struggling with her career at the end of her days. Like all three stories in this book a major theme is a mother at odds with her child's career choice or marriage choice. She brings him or her up to be something they're just not.  The mothers just want to prove to themselves that they are good ones. In the monologue, characterized by long ranting with no punctuation, a woman grieves for her daughter after she takes her own life. She attempts to defend herself as others blame her for it.  Everything she did was for her children.  She remarried and had so much love for her and her baby son that she becomes a mentally ill recluse that hates everything about  her existence. Another theme is faithfulness in a marriage: adultery and divorce.  In the last short story,  the  saddest and most perturbing one, Du Beauvoir depicts a woman's descent into madness as she tries to come to terms with the unfaithfulness of her husband who falls for a younger woman. As the inevitable takes its course she only has one choice but she can't let go. He no longer wants her and he can't juggle two relationships at once. Her disintegration  reaches a climax and then sharply reaches a denouement: what does she have after everything she has worked for is gone?

Beowulf by Unknown

adventurous dark hopeful medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

I really enjoyed this epic poem about the brave, courageous, noble, monster-killer:  Beowulf. There is a perpetual reference to God in the purely and strictly monotheistic sense of the word except near the end where the term Father in heaven is used. I can't believe this text had to be translated before it became what it is today. The meter and rhyme used throughout is perfect in English and adds value to th  opinion that it's native tongue is that. As an aesthetic artifiact, an object of beauty, it's obvious that the author should be credited with the language and style, not the translator. The author is anonymous and no one knows where it was written or why. The back cover said it was written in England before the Norman conquest. The defense rests its case.

Fairest by Gail Carson Levine

adventurous dark hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

A brave indictment against conventional ideas of beauty by society's impressionable standards, I think  this book is important because it raises awarenes  for inner beauty over outward unlike what is held valuable in superficial societies. 

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book's writing is superb. However, the main character's suicide idealization near the end was perturbing. From what I read  Virginia Woolf committed suicide.