Rebecca Reads

Although I didn’t love Jazz as much as I loved Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I found it to have a similar depth. I know such depth requires me to reread it in order to truly sum up the main point of the novel. Because I’ve only read it once, I’m somewhat stumped as I go to [...]

Although I do not like reading violent stories, one of my favorite books has such a poignant message that I love it regardless, or maybe because of, the brutal facts is illustrates.
In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the ghosts of slavery live on, even though it is the year 1873. In one sense, Beloved is literally [...]

The narrator of Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, is dead.
Meet Susie. Susie Salmon was 14 when she was brutally raped and murdered in a cornfield near her home. Now, as her family recovers and learns to live again, she watches them from her gazebo in her heaven and begins to come to terms [...]

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books; not same version as the Amazon link at left) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. Then again, maybe the Grimm brothers wrote down similar [...]

There was no doubt that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (reviewed here) was written to teach both children and adults lesson about Christianity and life; there was little attempt to veil the message behind the story.
While the message in modern children’s literature may not be so thinly veiled, to me it seems obvious that authors still [...]