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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

A.M. Jenkins’s Beating Heart

Jenkins, A.M.  Beating Heart.  New York: Harpercollins, 2006.
The alternating narratives are visually distinguished from each other–his is third person present narrative that looks typically novel-like, hers a first person collection of thoughts set out on the page to look sort of like poetry (but hardly actually ever achieving anything poetic–the only thing this spacing of [...]

Blake Nelson’s Gender Blender

Nelson, Blake.  Gender Blender.  2006.  New York: Delacorte, 2007.
As the back cover suggests, “something FREAKY happens”–more or less as it once did in Mary Rodgers’s Freaky Friday, except this time the two characters who switch bodies are a middle school boy and girl.   It’s played mostly for laughs, as the two then have to deal [...]

Adele Griffin’s Where I Want to Be

Griffin, Adele.  Where I Want to Be.  2005.  New York: Speak/Penguin, 2007.
This book is strangely similar to Marci Dermansky’s Twins:  two sisters, (close in age but not in this case actually twins) are in many ways opposites: one is considered attractive, the other not so much; one is sociable and well-liked, the other isolated; one [...]