I FINALLY FINISHED THIS BOOK!!! I've been reading it since February. Not because I didn’t like it but because I started it at the wrong time. When I began reading it, I was on a tight schedule and didn't have time to read it regularly. The more I delayed reading, the more I lost interest in the book. It became a vicious cycle.
It gives you enemies-to-lovers vibes. There were Nora Stephens who was a literary agent and Charlie Lastra who was a book editor. Nora was like a shark when it came to her job and loved ones. Charlie was so brutal about his criticism. When Nora's sister, Libby insisted on going on a holiday, Nora had no choice but to accept it. She loved busy streets, and traffic noise in the city. She wasn't quite sure about the holiday in a small town called Sunshine Falls. That was a quite different experience for Nora. The plot twist was good enough to keep you awake and the tension between Nora and Charlie was terrific
When I finished it, my overall thoughts were that I loved it and regretted that it took so long to finish it.
In the "ideal" world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders.
This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are "released"--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also "released," but with no fanfare.
Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world.
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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Volume 1
A book of this stature hardly needs another review explaining how great it is, and, not being all that cultured
It is a great and thoroughly absorbing book. Proust really captures that time in adolescence when all you can think about is romance -- you evaluate everyone you meet on the basis of their appeal to you as a romantic target. Regardless of whether or not you ever actually speak to them. If you need to skip a few paragraphs, go ahead and do so. It is worthwhile to go back and read the beginning of a long sentence to be sure you understand his point.
As for the novel itself, it is divided into two parts, which both have a "blossoming" young female characters. In Part I - "At Mme Swann's" - the young girl is Swann's daughter, Gilberte. This part of the novel was originally meant to be included in Swann's Way, and - if one reads the novels back-to-back - the story continues smoothly between the novels. Gilberte is Marcel's first great, doomed love affair.
It details the narrator's growing acquaintance with the Swann family in Paris (where he gradually transfers his affections from their daughter Gilberte to Odette, Madame Swann, even as he makes his first experiments in writing),
Part II takes place in the fictional seaside resort town of Balbec. The girl in question here is Marcel's main love-interest, Albertine. Although people view Albertine as the most significant factor in the novel, I don't find this to be true - she's barely in the story. More significant is Marcel's friend, Robert Saint-Loupe. His stay at the seaside resort Balbec (modeled after Cabourg), where he come into contact, for the first time, with several members of the aristocratic Guermantes family who will have a profound influence on his
