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Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.… (mais)
This was a great book for me, especially with where I'm at in life right now. I really identified with Mona Gray, the main character, and I really liked her deal with numbers--I have very similar habits. I read this after reading Bender's two short story collections, and it really fell in-sync well with them. It was a fairly quick read...the beginning really drew me in, it slowed down a bit after, but I couldn't put it down for the second half of the book. This is one I'll be coming back to on down the line. ( )
I read this at the same time I listened to The Bell Jar, and they felt cut from similar thematic cloth, even though this wasn’t nearly as harrowing as The Bell Jar and was also surreal and magically realist instead of a lightly fictionalized memoir. It’s mostly just that both books are about young women struggling with depression and having a hard time dealing with adulthood and modern life. This one had a happy ending if only because the author is still alive. ( )
the writing here is really good, and the story quite creative (while showing us the total ordinariness of life). i don't usually like books that are too weird, and this comes awfully close to that line. but, for me, it doesn't cross it. i guess there are parts that are pretty strange, but all of it makes sense and serves a purpose. everything ties together so well. the way mona tries to balance her life, not get too involved in anything that can be taken from her later, how she pulls herself back and quits whenever she starts to get attached to (or good at) something. how she relates to mr jones and his (literal) wear-his-mood-on-his-chest. how she retreats into numbers, which have their own beauty and order.
i really, really like this. this is smart and well done. i look forward to reading more by her. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Numbers are friends for me, more or less. It doesn't mean the same to you, does it--3,844? For you it's just a three and an eight and a four and a four. But I say, "Hi! 62 squared." -Mathematician Wim Klein
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
for suzanne and karen
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
So. There was this kingdom once where everybody lived for ever. -Prologue
On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Some worries sit in the stomach like old bad food. Most of the time, they are so quiet and dormant you can’t feel them at all. Oh good, you think. They’re gone.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
The viewers watched on their tiptoes, twenty feet high, as the departing group walked straight into death, and they watched as long as they could, her knees, her waist, her shoulders, the to pof her head, but in minutes the path had sloped down again and even the people on the gallows could see nothing more than an empty yellow hill rolling out in front of them like a carpet of sunlit water.
Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.
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