Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.
Résultats trouvés sur Google Books
Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
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.… (plus d'informations)
I couldn't decide if the author is neurodiverse or if she was just writing about a character who is. Mona is obsessed with numbers, and she doesn't quite fit in with other people. Of course, everyone in the whole book is just a little bit off: her father with his hypochondria, Mr Jones wearing mood numbers and pretty much ignoring his customers, the new science teacher with burns on his arms (Mona keeps thinking they are from science experiments, but I think they are self-inflicted). Mona thinks that when a number appears in your yard that will be the age you die, because it happened to be true twice. She doesn't know how to handle her father's illness. He was kind of her role model, getting her to be involved in running. Her mother just wants her to be normal, to get excited about birthdays and buy a dress. Mona buys an ax and brings it to the classroom. This is definitely not something people usually do. I can't see what other readers think is 'magical realsim' in this novel. Yes, things are off kilter, but that's all in Mona's perception. The book ends with a crisis, off kilter again, but it allows Mona to break through her worries. ( )
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. ( )
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
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
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
for suzanne and karen
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
So. There was this kingdom once where everybody lived for ever. -Prologue
On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
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.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
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.
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
Wikipédia en anglais
Aucun
▾Descriptions de livres
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.
▾Descriptions provenant de bibliothèques
Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque
▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
)
)
)
Google Books — Chargement...
(3.74)
2
Mona buys an ax and brings it to the classroom. This is definitely not something people usually do.
I can't see what other readers think is 'magical realsim' in this novel. Yes, things are off kilter, but that's all in Mona's perception.
The book ends with a crisis, off kilter again, but it allows Mona to break through her worries. (