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 [...]

Dennis Foon’s Skud

Foon, Dennis. Skud.  Toronto Groundwood, 2003.
Four boys who attend the same high school all face problems relating to their understanding of what it means to be masculine.  As a result, at least three things happen in the course of their alternations, as each speaks of what is happening to himself in first person in the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]