Book Review
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Why the Garcia Girls Should Be In The Norton Anthology
By Aodhán Ridenour When Ezra Pound said “Make it new” at the beginning of the twentieth century, hesparked a fire that needed two significant forces to flourish: experimentation and demographicchange. Julia Alverez’s novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents represents a log pile ofintersections with Pound’s famous statement. From the novel’s peculiar narrative constructionand direction, the counterculturalist undertones, to the intimate semi-autobiographical stories ofoutsider experience, Garcia Girls adheres to—and challenges—the somewhat ambiguousrulebook for inclusion in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. As the introduction ofNorton states, “The vitality of contemporary American literature, evident throughout the mostrecent selections in this volume, is fueled by two great engines, one artistic and…
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Review: David Mitchell’s Slade House
David Mitchell is a thrilling author who weaves his works like a knotted ball of string; there is an end and a beginning, but the reader is seemingly on their own when it comes to everything in the middle. Because of these works, Mitchell is an award-winning and bestselling author who, according to his website, was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People world-wide. His novels are stand-alone explanations of these awards. Slade House is one of his twisted novels, where Mitchell’s knotted ball is never fully unwound. The novel’s basic structure is simple. There are two twins who inhabit Slade House, a time-warp of…
