The novel Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler is a beautifully thought out book that follows the complicated life of seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe as he seeks forgiveness for his sins both from himself and from God. Ian blamed himself for causing his older brother, Danny’s suicide and his guilt slowly ate away at him until he was drawn into the Church of Second Chance. By this time, Ian was in college and both Danny’s daughter and step-children were orphaned and being taken care of by his elderly parents. So Reverend Emmett, the pastor of Ian’s newfound church, decided that the only way Ian could find forgiveness from God and from himself was to quit college and offer up all his time to raise Danny’s children. The plot spans the time frame of about 25 years, in which time Ian and the three children slowly mature and become very developed, intricate characters, and the story takes place in the city of Baltimore through the years 1965 to 1990. Anne Tyler spins a very believable tale, using a writing style that easily reminds the reader how quickly life goes by.
The novel starts out with seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe, young and handsome, and without a care in the world. He’s still dating his high school sweetheart with plans to get married right after they’ve both finished college and his entire family seems to be the exact representation of the American dream. Unfortunately, all that dramatically changes when Ian’s older brother brings home a mysterious beauty, announcing that after only two weeks of having known Lucy, he plans to marry her right away. At first, Ian didn’t seem to mind her and he barely seemed to take notice of her two children from her previous marriage. However, Ian starts to notice Lucy behaving suspiciously, for example...
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...Maybe is an extraordinary novel. For middle-aged men and women, the setting of the story would bring back memories of their childhoods and cause feelings of nostalgia, showing that life passes almost too quickly. Honestly, any reader between the ages of 16 to 80 would be able to read this book. The vocabulary is easy, the diction is accurate and the book structure, for the most part, keeps the book flowing smoothly. The characters have a timeless quality to them, causing anybody to be able to relate to at least one or two of them, and each aspect of the book is so realistic that I could have been convinced that the story was based on real life events. This book was beautifully written and so if it was not out of print and unbelievably hard to get a hold of, I would recommend it to anyone in need of a captivating book to read.
Works Cited
Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler
At age sixteen, Janie is a beautiful young girl who is about to enter womanhood and experience the real world. Being joyous and unconcerned, she is thrown into an arranged marriage with Logan Killicks. He is apparently unromantic and unattractive. Logan is a widower and a successful farmer who desires a wife who would not have her own opinions. He is set on his own ways and is troubled by Janie, who forms her own opinions and refuses to work. He is unable to sexually appeal or satisfy Janie and therefore does not truly connect with her as husband and wife should. Janie's wild and young spirit is trapped within her and she plays the role of a silent and obeying wife. But her true identity cannot withhold itself for she has ambitions and she wills to see the world and find love. There was a lack of trust and communication between Logan and Janie. Because of the negative feelings Janie has towards Logan, she deems that this marriage is not what she desires it to be. The pear tree and the bees had a natural att...
Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is the story of an African boy, Kek, who loses his father and a brother and flees, leaving his mother to secure his safety. Kek, now in Minnesota, is faced with difficulties of adapting to a new life and of finding his lost mother. He believes that his mother still lives and would soon join him in the new found family. Kek is taken from the airport by a caregiver who takes him to live with his aunt. It is here that Kek meets all that amazed him compared to his home in Sudan, Africa. Home of the brave shows conflicts that Kek faces. He is caught between two worlds, Africa and America. He feels guilty leaving behind his people to live in a distant land especially his mother, who he left in the midst of an attack.
In "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin, the essay uses fragments throughout the essay to symbolize all the topics and people that are involved. The fragments in the essay tie together insides and outsides, human nature, everything affected by past, secrets, cause and effect, and development with the content. These subjects and the fragments are also similar with her life stories and her interviewees that all go together. The author also uses her own memories mixed in with what she heard from the interviewees. Her recollection of her memory is not fully told, but with missing parts and added feelings. Her interviewee's words are told to her and brought to the paper with added information. She tells throughout the book about these recollections.
“From Lieutenant Nun,” a memoir written by doña Catalina de Erauso, tells an intriguing story of a young Spanish female and her advantageous journey through Spain and the New World. Her family intends for her to become a nun but, that is not the life she seeks for herself. Therefore, she breaks away from the convent in hopes of finding somewhere to make her fortune by passing as a male. Catalina’s story is noteworthy because it gives readers another perspective of exploration focusing on self-discovery during the seventeenth century emphasizing how passing as a male is the only thing that secured her ability to explore. In the memoir, Catalina repeatedly reminisces about clothing and, whether she consciously or unconsciously does so, she allows the reader to see that this is an important aspect of her exploration. Throughout Catalina’s journey, clothing plays an increasingly important role not only in her travels but, also her personal life because it symbolized ones status, role, gender and privileges.
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
Being a devout Catholic, O’Connor’s “faith consciously informed her fiction. The difficulty of her work, she explained…is that many of her readers do not understand the redemptive quality of ‘grace,’ and, she added, ‘don’t recognize it when they see it. All my stories are...
In Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I A Woman,” she speaks of women and African Americans deserving to have equal rights to men. The speech was delivered in 1851 at a convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth’s goal during the speech was to make people doubt what they previously believed. For them to join her outlook about equal rights.
Through attention to detail, repeated comparison, shifting tone, and dialogue that gives the characters an opportunity to voice their feelings, Elizabeth Gaskell creates a divide between the poor working class and the rich higher class in Mary Barton. Gaskell places emphasis on the differences that separate both classes by describing the lavish, comfortable, and extravagant life that the wealthy enjoy and compares it to the impoverished and miserable life that the poor have to survive through. Though Gaskell displays the inequality that is present between both social classes, she also shows that there are similarities between them. The tone and diction change halfway through the novel to highlight the factors that unify the poor and rich. In the beginning of the story John Barton exclaims that, “The rich know nothing of the trials of the poor…” (11), showing that besides the amount of material possessions that one owns, what divides the two social classes is ability to feel and experience hardship. John Barton views those of the upper class as cold individuals incapable of experiencing pain and sorrow. Gaskell, however proves Barton wrong and demonstrates that though there are various differences that divide the two social classes, they are unified through their ability to feel emotions and to go through times of hardship. Gaskell’s novel reveals the problematic tension between the two social classes, but also offers a solution to this problem in the form of communication, which would allow both sides to speak of their concerns and worries as well as eliminate misunderstandings.
Communication is cited as a contributing factor in 70% of healthcare mistakes, leading to many initiatives across the healthcare settings to improve the way healthcare professionals communicate. (Kohn, 2000.)
At first glance the characters Connie from “Where are you going? Where have you been?” and Little Red Riding Hood from the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” may seem to have nothing in common. However, from the start one can compare how much they actually have in common. Though these two characters are very different they are the same in many ways. Their story, from beginning to end, is similar. It is easy to see how alike and different they are with the description of Connie and Little Red Riding Hood’s lives, the relationship with their wolves, and their tragic endings.
Janie’s first attempt at love does not turn out quite like she hopes. Her grandmother forces her into marrying Logan Killicks. As the year passes, Janie grows unhappy and miserable. By pure fate, Janie meets Joe Starks and immediately lusts after him. With the knowledge of being wrong and expecting to be ridiculed, she leaves Logan and runs off with Joe to start a new marriage. This is the first time that Janie does what she wants in her search of happiness: “Even if Joe was not waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good…From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32). Janie’s new outlook on life, although somewhat shadowed by blind love, will keep her satisfied momentarily, but soon she will return to the loneliness she is running from.
The book Saint Anything is about protagonist Sydney Stanford, a teenage girl who believes she is invisible, existing only in the shadow of her older brother Peyton. The novel opens just as Peyton is sentenced to prison for a drunk driving accident that left a young boy paralyzed. For most of Sydney’s life, her parents have focused on her older brother and his mistakes. Her mother lives in a world of enabling and denial and her father simply follows along. Ames is Peyton’s best friend who he met at Narcotics Anonymous. Ames spends a lot of time at the Stanford house, comforting Sydney’s mother and quite frankly creeping Sydney out. Ames says and does some weird and disturbing things to Sydney; her parents do not believe her until Ames has Sydney
Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor, is an fascinating yet disturbing novel. Wise Blood is a story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old soldier who comes home from World War Two and gets trapped in a fight between faith and disbelief. He becomes captivated by a preacher named Asa Hawks and his bastard fifteen-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath. In a way to prove how much of a pessimist Motes is, he founds The Church of God Without Christ, but is still frustrated that he is unable to lose his faith in a higher power. He later meets Enoch Emery, a young man who shows him a mummified “holy child”, and is greatly influenced by Hazel's struggles, later becoming Hazel’s companion in his endeavors. This story is about redemption, vengeance, greed, false prophets and wisdom. The book is such a riveting piece that there are many criticisms regarding it and its themes.
I would recommend this book to anybody, it appeals any audience. It's a wonderful story
In the poems “ we grow accustomed to the dark” and “before I got my eye put out”, by Emily Dickinson they both talk about changes in life and how you overlook things Your vision, or direction. Both the poems speak about things that people go through in life, like even though you're going into the dark and you don’t know what you’ll find. There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel to lead you. Also, getting your eye put out is just like a bad mood, If you're in a bad mood, then you’ll look at things in A bad way.