Already excited for Oberlin!

Await Your Reply

Summer time is finally here and I'm so excited to be reading again! I picked up this book, by Dan Chaon, because I'm going to Oberlin College in the fall where I want to study creative writing, and Dan Chaon is one of the creative writing professors there. Plus, oddly enough, he is good friends with one of my favorite high school teachers. I hope he doesn't leave before I get to have him as a professor because I was very impressed by this novel.

There are three separate story lines in this novel that eventually connect: Ryan, a college kid who just found out a big secret that's been kept from him his whole life, Lucy, a high school graduate who runs off with her former history teacher, and Miles, who has been looking for his missing and slightly insane twin brother Hayden for 10 years. Over the course of the book, the stories start to connect. At first, it is just in subtle ways, such as theme (the exploration of identity is a big one), but by the end, they are completely intertwined, and it's fun to find the clues along the way.

I suppose this is a suspense novel, but normally when I think of suspense novels, I think of a really exciting plot with lots of twists, but then characters and writing that are a bit shallow and underdeveloped. However, even through the plot twists, I feel like at it's core, "Await Your Reply" is still an excellent piece of literature. The characters feel real, and the prose is beautiful. I was very excited by this book, and I give it a solid 8 pretzel bites.

KAY

Let the summer reading begin

Atlas of Unknows

I finally finished my first book of the summer! It's a novel by Tania James about two sisters from India. The eldest, Linno, is an excellent artist, but her life hasn't exactly followed the traditional path, and she is haunted by her mother's death. The younger sister, Anju, is incredibly intelligent and wins a scholarship to study in New York, where things don't go exactly as planned.

I liked this book alright. It was written in a very slow and descriptive style, and I kept expecting to get more into it as the plot picked up and I began to connect more with the characters, but it never really happened. Plus, the ending wasn't as satisfying as I would have liked. I'm completely fine with loose ends, I just wish the whole story was given a little more meaning. I give it 7 pretzel bites.

KAY