Julie Lawson’s White Jade Tiger

Lawson, Julie.  White Jade Tiger.  1993.  Toronto: Sandcastle Dundurn, 2006.
The text is a traditional third person past narrative, usually focalized through the central character, Jasmine, but frequently interspersing sections involving not only Keung, a Chinese boy who comes to BC to find his father in the nineteenth century but also other Chinese characters connected to [...]

Monica Hughes’s Log Jam

Hughes, Monica.  Log Jam.  Toronto: Irwin, 1987.
Opposite to what tends to happen in novels presenting similar situations written more recently, Monica Hughes Log Jam rejects the power of Aboriginality in favour of white middle-class values.  The novel’s  pair of intertwined narratives involve a white middle class girl with family problems and an Aboriginal boy [...]

Richard Marsh’s The Joss: A Reversion

Marsh, Richard.  The Joss:  A Reversion. 1901.  Chicago:  Valancourt, 2007
Marsh, best known as author of the scary and truly unsettling novel The Beetle (1897), was a writer of popular junk for inexperienced or unsophisticated adult readers–and not always a very good one.  His stories, for instance, collected in The Seen and the Unseen (1900) often [...]

Marlene Carvell’s Sweetgrass Basket

Carvell, Marlene.  Sweetgrass Basket.  New York: Dutton, 2005
In this novel of what claims to be free verse, two young Mohawk sisters leave the reserve to attend a boarding school, and tell of their experiences there in alternating “poems.”  As is typical of texts of this sort, the sections are in the first-person present tense, as [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]