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Tag Archives: literary

Bear by Marian Engel (1976) – BR00162 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
July 11 2019

Plot or Premise

A historical librarian gets a chance to catalogue the books at a remote island home for a summer in Northern Ontario and encounters locals, free time to figure out her life, and a pet bear.

What I Liked

This book was given to me back in my teens, a gift of quality literature as it had just won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. I knew nothing about it as I started to read it. And I was relatively shocked to see “high literature” include bestiality and graphic descriptions of oral sex performed by the bear on the main character. The historical parts were awesome, as was the descriptions of the island and the passage of the summer.

What I Didn’t Like

I found the romanticization of the relationship with the bear a bit odd, as was the depersonalization of her other sexual partners during the summer. I also felt there were gaps in the ending — we saw what she intended to do, not what she actually did once she was back in Toronto.

The Bottom Line

Bestiality is a strange theme for an award-winner.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged adventure, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, B&N, book review, Chapters, e-book, fiction, gift, Good Reads, Google, historical, Kobo, Library Thing, literary, Nook, novel, OPL, PolyWogg, prose, psychology, Reading Challenge, romance, stand-alone | Leave a reply

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2006) – BR00152 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
April 2 2019

Plot or Premise

A young girl uses stolen books to distract herself from the reality of living in Nazi Germany in WWII while hiding a Jewish man in her basement.

What I Liked

It is incredibly difficult to know how to review this book. The second half moves along at a much quicker pace and with much higher stakes. The book is narrated by Death / Grim Reaper, and the chapter headings give glimpses of what is to come. There are some red herrings near the end, implying one ending while leading to another, but overall it is pretty solid. The characters are lively, the girl is outstanding, and there are glimpses of her family that offer rare moments of joy and love. And it moved me to tears at the end.

What I Didn’t Like

It is hard to accept the implied message that “most Germans were good / nice”, it was just the Nazis that were bad people. And even the storyline written by the Jewish man in the basement is that it is all because of the Fuhrer, that Hitler is the only truly evil one. There are parts of it that read like almost an apology for Nazism rather than a sense of accountability for the nation’s deeds. The extra materials at the end tell how the author was inspired by his grandparents’ accounts of the ordinariness (in some ways) of the war in Germany for Germans – something that happened around them, or to them, not committed by them. In terms of the writing, the first half is a bit slow and dull, and the constant foreshadowing is repetitive and annoying at the start, less so at the end. The caricature of the mother is ridiculous; she only becomes human near the end. Finally, and this is a bit of a spoiler, the story ends rather abruptly, leaving out a huge opportunity to tell some more story. I know this book is aimed at teens and is hugely popular, but I would not wants someone relying on this book as their only source of history.

The Bottom Line

Solid read, not sure about the message.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, B&N, biography, book review, borrowed, Chapters, children, epic, fiction, Good Reads, Google, historical, history, Kobo, Library Thing, literary, Nook, novel, OPL, paperback, political, PolyWogg, prose, Reading Challenge, stand-alone, used, Young Adult | Leave a reply

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