Books Five and Six

Book Five: Wuthering High
Date Finished: January 7
Pages: 272

I think that I must be on some kind of subconscious Virginia Woolf kick. The premise behind this book is pretty entertaining: authors are stuck in the Purgatory of Bard Academy for dying before their time and are forced to teach miscreant high school students how to behave. Various authors include Virginia Woolf as the constantly dripping English teacher, Hunter S. Thompson, the maniac school bus driver, and Ernest Hemingway as the gym teacher. Since they call the teachers Ms. W and Coach H, I suppose high school students who haven't heard of these authors might have a difficult time picking up on the various hints dropped about who these authors are. Certainly my students, who just asked me if Ernest Hemingway wrote the Dr. Seuss books, might have a hard time figuring out what was going on.
As far as the plot goes, it was a pretty basic teen fiction novel. It was predictable, but not annoyingly predictable. It was entertaining, and certainly more entertaining as an English teacher than maybe it would be otherwise. I don't believe that you would really need a basic understanding of the plot of Wuthering Heights to understand this book because the plot of the novel is discussed and the characters are adequately explained. My hope would be that teens who read this book might be interested in then finding and reading Wuthering Heights for themselves.
Wuthering High reminded me of a teen fiction version of The Eyre Affair, certainly not as well written or nerdy as The Eyre Affair but still Wuthering High is a decent read.

Book Six: Graceling
Finished: January 8
Pages: 471

Apparently the theme of this day's reading was young adult lit. While my students were picking out their library books, I decided to pick up a couple of young adult books that I have seen around that looked interesting. I read about this novel in a random blog I came across last week, and decided to pick it up.
A first novel by a seemingly young author, I thought the fantasy world to be pretty well developed, and certainly the idea of "Graced" individuals was an interesting way of giving people supernatural powers without making it too trite. I am tired of reading the fantasy novels where the main character develops amazing powers with untold limits that allow him/her to do anything, even these completely unrealistic feats of strength/bravery/endurance that completely change the world. This book certainly had a smattering of this problem, but it didn't annoy me to the extent of some of the books that I have read in the past. Some of her characterization was too one-dimensional for me to really appreciate, certainly the main bad guy was too flat to be scary at all, but the development of her main character was interesting and often unexpected. I can appreciate that the story kept me guessing in the middle, even if the ending was not surprising at all.
Certainly I would recommend this book to students who like fantasy, I think that the book would interest them. I am not so sure that I would recommend this book to someone my age, just because it was often too adolescent to ignore.

Good Reading,
Caitlin