Karen Hesse’s Brooklyn Bridge

Hess, Karen.  Brooklyn Bridge.  New York: Fiewel and Friends, 2008.
This novel starts out for seeming to be a certain kind of book–and continued to seem to be that for a very long time; but as it approaches its conclusion, it suddenly changes into quite a different kind of book, in a way that makes an [...]

Karen Hesse’s Witness

Hesse, Karen. Witness. New York: Scholastic, 2001.
The text consists of a series of poems in free verse, each in the voice of one of eleven characters who all live in a small town in Vermont in the twenties.   The free verse here seems a little less free of verse than that in a number of [...]

Welwyn Wilton Katz’s Come Like Shadows

Katz, Welwyn.  Come Like Shadows.  1993.  Regina: Coteau, 2000.
The most noticeable thing about this novel is just how very, very complex is the situation it describes.  The plot centres around a production at the Canadian Stratford Festival of Macbeth, but also involves at least four different historical events: Shakespeare’s version of what happens in Macbeth, [...]

David Lodge’s Thinks . . .

Lodge, David.  Thinks . . . . 2001.  New York and London: Penguin, 2002.
This novel is so elegantly and intricately built on its alternating focalizations that I’m tempted to identify it as a meta-alternating narrative–an novel in which the structure of alternating narratives is so completely linked to and expressive of its meanings that it [...]

Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stone

Crace, Jim.   The Gift of Stones.  1988.  New York: Scribner’s, 1989.
Okay, I am admitting defeat on this one.  I have absolutely no idea why this novel for adults makes use of alternating narratives.  All I can say is that it certainly isn’t for any of the usual reasons I’ve been identifying in all the many [...]

Martyn Godfrey’s Alien War Games

Godfrey, Martyn.  Alien War Games.  Richmond hill, ON:  Scholastic TAB, 1984
This is the third book I’ve read which describes an encounter of people from earth and an alien civilization in terms of alternating narratives, one human, the other alien; the other two, both discussed in earlier entries on this blog,  are Bruce Coville’s I Was [...]

Pamela F. Service’s Under Alien Stars

Service, Pamela F. Under Alien Stars.  New York:  Atheneum, 1990.
In a future that sounds much like now, an alien civilization has been occupying earth for the last decade or so.  The alternating focalizing characters are a human boy, Jason, and an alien girl, Aryl.  To begin with the observe each other with disgust–her maroon skins [...]

Ellen Hopkins’s Identical

Hopkins, Ellen.  Identical.  New York: Margaret K. McElderry, 2008.
This novel is so over the top that it almost becomes entertaining for its sheer over-the-topness.  Almost, but not quite, because what’s over the top about it exactly what makes soap operas over the top, and so it’s just too expectable to be all that interesting.  Indeed, [...]