Action-packed this book is not. There are two major events:
1. The narrator's sister has a baby.
2. The narrator meets a boy.
For real. If you like a lot of action, this is NOT the book for you. It isn't a huge exaggeration to say that nothing happens.
But if you're looking for a nice, quiet -- sometimes dreamy -- book with beautiful writing (and the added bonus of an Australian setting), here it is.
Kate O'Farrell gets to know her new notebook here:
You smell (I have just sniffed you) clean and sharp and a bit spicy. Some books smell of mushrooms, but by the time you have developed that mushroomy odour I will be an old woman.
She loves reading, and the parts about books were my favorite bits -- at one point, she describes her adopted grandmother/mother as a sort of "Miss Havisham in reverse", which I thought was especially nice. The book bits outshone even the vague romance, but that might be partly because I found the boy -- Alex -- a bit too... something for my tastes. Precious? Pretentious? Deliberately obtuse? A bit of all three? Yuck.
Kate is given to flights of fancy that, for some reason, are okay in fictional characters (For more information, please re-visit Anne Shirley -- she's a textbook example of this phenomenon) but would be hideously obnoxious in real life:
I would really like to be a tree. Not for ever, just for a little while. A mango perhaps, with lots of sheltering leaves and luscious fruits.
It's good to read a quality article for once
Posted by: | 18 October 2009 at 11:38 PM