Post 11: Book Talk

Post 10: Book 3 Review

Book 3 Book Review
 

Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple

Room by Emma Donoghue

Where'd You Go Bernadette:
Bernadette Fox (an antisocial, fiercely opinionated ex-architect) disappears from thin air... almost literally. Bernadette’s best friend, her practically genius 15-year old daughter Bee, will not rest until she is found. This all started when Bee asked to take a family trip to Antarctica after acing all of her classes. Bee is the perfect daughter and her parents could not deny her this wish. After this Bernadette begins acting strange, like falling asleep in public parks and spending all her time emailing her personal assistant who lives in India. Not understanding her actions, Bernadette’s husband, Elgin Branch, decides it is time for an intervention to get her help. During this intervention was when Bernadette disappeared in her own home. After extensive searches, Elgin just accepts that Bernadette must be dead (probably got too drunk and threw herself overboard) and Bee seems to be the only person who won't accept that her mother is gone.

Strengths & Weaknesses:
Where'd You Go Bernadette is written in documents and letters sent from person to person. This set-up of the novel keeps the reader on their feet when they are reading.

However, because the novel is written in letters when a new character is introduced it can take a while until you figure out how that character is and what connection they have to the story. This is because the character does not come out and say who they are in the letter; you have to connect all of the documents and letters.

Room:
Room is written from the perspective of a 5-year old boy who has never seen anything other than what is in Room. Whatever Jack sees on TV, he doesn't believe it's actually real (e.g. grass, dogs, etc.). Old Nick comes to bring Sunday Treat and "make the garbage disappear" but even Jack isn't sure if Old Nick is real. Jack's mom was kidnapped when she was 19 years old by Old Nick. Old Nick was Jack's father.
Strengths & Weaknesses:
This enitre book was creatively written from the perspective of a 5-year old boy, therefore the language of the book is that of a young child. When talking to his mother one morning Jack said, "Not-when you're on at the same time I'm off" (Donoghue 4). (By "on" and "off", Jack means being awake and asleep.)

This link takes you to see Jack's handwriting
http://www.roomthebook.com/inside/about-the-book/



On her website Emma Donoghue described how she went about creating the language for the book, "Just as in previous novels I put together a mini-dictionary of how people spoke in 1788 or 1864, this time I made myself a dictionary of my son’s kid-English, then narrowed it down to some classic errors and grammatical oddities that would not seriously confuse readers" (Donoghue). http://www.roomthebook.com/inside/why-and-how/
By writing the book from Jack's perspective, the reader truly gets a sense of how innocent Jack is and how big the world seems from his eyes.
However, by the book being written from Jack's perspective, the reader only knows what Jack knows. This can lead to confusion throughout the book.

 

Room vs. Where'd You Go Bernadette:

These two books are completely different genres, but at the same time they also have many similarities. Room is literary fiction with elements of suspense while Where'd You Go Bernadette is a comedy. Being two completely different genres does not stop these book from having significant similarities.

• Even though the two books are completely different genres they both have the similar plot line: someone going missing. In Room, Ma goes missing because she was kidnapped by Old Nick. In Where'd You Go Bernadette, Bernadette went missing after an intervention.
• Bee and Jack are also very similar characters (Both being the protagonists). Although both characters come from completely different places and have completely different backgrounds, they do have their similarities. Both characters are very intelligent for their age and both characters have a strong and indescribable connection to their mothers. In Where'd You Go Bernadette, Bee is determined to find her mother and will not believe that she is dead. Responding to her dad, Bee says about her mother, "She was my best friend" (Semple 287).

Is and Is Not's:
Room was not a story of Old Nick's evils or terrible actions, but it was the story of Ma and Jack pushing through the terrible conditions he put them through and joining the rest of society and their family. On her website, Emma Donoghue even stated, "It was not Old Nick's evil that fascinated me, but the resilience of Ma and Jack: the nitty-gritties of their survival, their trick of more or less thriving under apparently unbearable conditions."

Where'd You Go Bernadette is not a story of Bernadette's craziness but a story of the power of a mother-daughter relationship.





Post 9: Heroes and Villains

Heroes and Villains

Room by Emma Donoghue

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

In Room by Emma Donoghue, in my opinion there are two protagonists; Jack and his mother. However the main one would be Jack, a five year old boy who has never been outside Room.  Jack has qualities from various archetypes for heroes. At the beginning of the book, Jack’s main challenge was Old Nick. Old Nick kidnapped his mother and kept them hidden in an old shack, so Jack had never seen the outside world. After Jack and his mother figure out a plan to escape, Jack’s new problem he has to face is fitting in with society. For the first five years of his life the only person he had ever talked to was his mother and he was not accustomed to typical societal norms.

                In Room the antagonist is an old man who Jack calls Old Nick. There is not enough background information given on Old Nick to know if he follows the six stages of a villain. However he does follow some of the stages in his own way. Stage 2 (obsession), he shows when he finds a way to lure Jack’s mom, who he calls Ma, into his truck.  He is very isolated form the rest of the world and has a 14-foot fence around his backyard so no one can see in. This follows Stage 4, isolation. Old Nick defiantly follows Stage 6 (cruelty/wickedness) because how inhumane he treats Jack and Ma by keeping them hostage.

                In Where’d You Go, Bernadette the clear protagonists is Bee, who once her mother goes missing would set off to find her. Bee is the epitome of a daughter: with perfect grades and an unbeatable drive to do her absolute best. Bernadette, her mother, is an antisocial, ex-architect who had her only masterpiece ruined in just a couple of hours. Bee’s father works for Microsoft and absolutely loves his job. Bee and Jack are very different: Bee fits perfectly into society and in her school while Jack is struggling to understand what to do and what not to do in society.

                There is no clear antagonist at the moment in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Bernadette Fox often butt-heads with Audrey Griffin, her neighbor who has a son that goes to Bee’s school. There is not really enough information about Audrey yet to know if she is the only antagonist, but there are a couple of encounters between Bernadette and Audrey. For example Audrey claims Bernadette ran over her foot with her car while Bee claims that Audrey was not even close to the car.

Post 8: Truth in Memior

In my opinion, “half-truths” can still be considered a good story; however the story is no longer a memoir or non-fiction.  Of course if an author is trying to recollect a specific dialogue that occurred when he/she was five years old, the author will not be able to rewrite word for word exact what was said- but as long as the main idea of the conversation remains the same and no significant things were add, I think that conversation and book could still be considered non-fiction. However changing large details within a story to make it more interesting no longer makes the story non-fiction and I think the author should definably tell the readers the story has be altered. If I found out that Aron Ralston didn’t really cut off his arm and someone came save him but he changed those details in his book Between a Rock and a Hard Place to make it more interesting, then I would no longer find the book as inspiring as it was before. I think we do need labels between Fiction and Non-Fiction because a miraculous story has even more value if it truly occurred the way the author wrote it. So if an author wants to bend the truth to tell their story, they should be able to, however their story should no longer be labeled as non-fiction.