E.R. Franks’s Life is Funny, One More Time

I’ve found a review of Life is Funny, discussed in my last post, that I wrote back when the book was pubished in 200.  It takes quite on different slant on some of the same aspects of the novel:
Life Is Funny is about as shapeless a novel as they come. It has eleven main characters, [...]

E.R. Franks’s Life Is Funny

Frank, E.R.  Life is Funny.  New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000.
This is another example of a series of fairly separate short stories each focalized from a different first-person present point of view and woven together into what announces itself as a novel–although how exactly it becomes one, how it has any actual cohesiveness, is not necessarily [...]

J.L. Powers’s The Confessional

Powers, J.L.  The Confessional.  New York: Knopf, 2007.
The El Paso Chamber of Commerce must have hit men out gunning for J.L. Powers, the author of this book–or if not, they should have.  It makes life in that city sound completely hellish (and indeed, confirms my own impression of it from a brief stay at a [...]

Rachel Anderson’s The Bus People

Anderson, Rachel.  The Bus People.  1989.  New York: Henry Holt, 1992.
Originally published in the UK, this book is a set of interconnected stories–a form of alternating narrative I haven’t looked at closely before.  in this case, they really aren’t all that interconnected.  The central characters in each of the stories are children who ride a [...]

Helen Frost’s Keesha’s House

Frost, Helen.  Keesha’s House.  2003.  New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2007.
There are no characters in this novel (by the Helen Frost who wrote The Braid, discussed here in a previous entry) and in fact, really, no plot.  It consists of a series of poems in traditional forms, mostly sestinas and some sonnets, each presenting a [...]

Rob Thomas’s Slave Day

Thomas, Rob.  Slave Day.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
This novel describes what happens to as group of people on a southern high school’s “Slave Day”–a day in which individuals are auctioned off to then act as slaves for those who bought them for the rest of the day–in particular, a group of eight alternating [...]

The Fate of Fenella, by Helen Mathers and 23 Others.

Mathers, Helen et al.  The Fate of Fenella.  (1892) Kansas City: Valancourt, 2008.
I’ve included this novel in my alternating narrative project, not because it is multi-focalized, but because it has multiple authors–24 of them (and thus offers an adult comparison with a YA novel like Click).  It was a project initiated by a publisher, who [...]

Daniel Pinkwater’s The Snarkout Boys And The Baconburg Horror

Pinkwater, Daniel. The Snarkout Boys And The Baconburg Horror.  New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepherd, 1984.
This book represents an interesting anomaly.  It’s a sequel to The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, in which Walter Galt tells of the supposedly wacky events of life while sneaking out at night to go to movies.  But [...]

Margaret Lanagan’s Tender Morsels

Lanagan, Margot.  Tender Morsels.  New York: Knopf, 2008.
I decided to read Tender Morsels as a break from my consideration of alternating narratives; all I knew about it was that a lot of people were talking about it, and it sounded interesting.  And I started to read it and, surprise, it contains alternating narratives!   I take [...]

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 [...]