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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.  [...]