Aboriginality and Alternating Narratives: Books and Themes, Part Two

What I’d like to do now is take a look at the books on aboriginality I listed in my last entry and see if I can begin to do some organizing of my thinking about them. I can do that by going through my various blog entries and notes on them and seeing if [...]

Aboriginality and Alternating Narratives: Books and Themes

I’ve now made my way through what I’ve been able to find so far of novels for young people with alternating narratives that relate in some way or other to aboriginal characters or issues, and I’d like to take a look over them as a group and see what themes or patterns might be emerging [...]

Terry Pratchett’s Nation

Pratchett, Terry.  Nation.  London: Doubleday, 2008.
Nation is most interesting (in the context of my alternating narratives project) as a very messy version of the alternating narrative novel.  There are, yes, two central characters whose points of view alternate throughout the book.  They are, yes, representative of apparently opposite groups or cultures.  They do, yes, turn [...]

Melanie Little’s The Apprentice’s Masterpiece

Little, Melanie. The Apprentice’s Masterpiece.  Toronto:  Annick, 2008
Medieval Spain, fifteenth century.  There are two focalizing characters: Ramon, the son of a scribe, a Jew whose family has converted to Christianity but nevertheless experiences an increasing intolerance of “conversos”–those not of longstanding Christian blood; and Amir, a Muslim slave who comes to work for Ramon’s father.  [...]

Doctor Atomic and Alternating Narratives

Having gone to the Cineplex last Saturday to see John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic “live” from the Met, I find myself thinking about it in terms of this alternating narratives project.  What struck me was that, while much of the music is evocative and interesting, there really isn’t much else very involving going on in [...]