SSR: Fledgling (yeah, again)

I already know that Zikomo made a post about this, but I read some of this book too and I want to write my own opinion. Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler, is a fiction novel about a vampire girl who wakes up in the woods unaware of who she is, how she got there and why she is there. So, Shori, is finding the answers that all lead back to how and why she was there at the beginning. She meets people who help her find these answers and struggles to remind herself that she's a vampire, to not suck their blood all the time. Out of the 310 pages, I only finished about 90-okay, now that I think about it I really didn't read that much. Still, Fledgling didn't capture my interest for long enough. It felt like it was taking too long to get to the main plot. Where I was, and who knows how much farther, it seemed like the book was going nowhere really. I had to keep forcing myself to bring this book every Monday. Besides, this whole vampire deal never grabbed me. To all you vampire-lovers, you'll probably like this one.

Daughter of Fortune

The book that I read is called Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende. In this 432 page romance novel we encounter Eliza Sommers who was abondoned at the doorstep at a wealthy home in Valparaiso, Chile as a newborn infant. The home is inhabited by two wealthy British brothers and their sister. As Eliza is growing up, she is unaware of her origins and really never questions where she comes from since she has enough love from her nanny and her aunt Rose(the British sister of the wealthy brothers). When Eliza gets older(maybe 16 or so) she falls in love with her uncle's field hand. The guy is poor and they have secret rendez vous. Eliza's lover is forced to live the country in search of gold in California. Eliza in turn goes after him. This book has lots of mysteries.

ssr: the bell jar

i've begun to read a book called The Bell Jar,

by Sylvia Plath

this book is about a college aged girl, she goes away on an internship and meets a best friend and she is struggling between this crazy wild girl who she has fun with or the other interns who are more respectable. she had a boyfriend she didn't really like and once she finds out he had sex she thinks she should do the same to even the score. part of it is about her struggle between yes and no and finding the right someone to have sex with. the book doesn't elaborate much on this but soon switches to a part in her life where she is depressed and it dying to kill herself. 

this girl, esther, is an emotional disaster and the things she thinks are interesting because they're coming from a person who feels nothing except for a desire to end her life. i hope she changes her mind by the end of the book.

it was highly recommended to me and i suggest you read it because everyone can learn a small bit from her experiences. 

Escape from polygamy

Last quarter I read quite a few nonfiction books. However, the book that really hit home for me was a book about life in the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Carolyn Jessop's 432-page memoir, Escape, is a book about her life and subsequent escape from the FLDS, which is a offshoot from the Mormon Church. She goes into detail about how she was brainwashed as a child into believing that her main purpose in life was to marry someone picked for her by the prophet and bear his many children. She also addresses the perceived reasons behind some of the practices the FLDS has. After some years of marriage she managed to escape from the polygamist society with her eight children, which is unheard of because it is incredibly hard to escape alone, and escaping with all your children is just not done.

This is a very inspiring book about standing against something you know is wrong, if when you stand alone and vulnerable. I recommend it because I've learned a lot for it. I'm not ignorant about the polygamist societies that exist amongst us but it was such an eye-opener to read what someone who had experienced it first-hand for so many years saw and how crazy the rules are in such places. I pride myself in being open-minded but this was incredibly hard to do while reading this book because a lot of what was said sounded so cruel and...downright horrific. The book is full of shocking practices and the fact that Carolyn Jessop was able to escape such a horrible lifestyle resulted in her becoming one of my heroes because of the amount of courage and spunk she showed in doing what she did, especially when she had only twenty dollars to her name, nine mouths to feed, and no experience in the "outside" world at the time of her escape.

However, I didn't really care for the ending of the book because it seemed so..stupid compared to the rest of the book. I can't explain why I really disliked it without spoiling the book but I can say this: after an author goes on for 407 pages about the pain and anguish women go through in a certain cult that will remain nameless, it is quite wrong to suddenly change the mood of the book by giving it such a happy ending. This might seem mean, but I wanted Jessop to have a bad ending. That doesn't mean that I'm not happy for her, because I am, and I think she deserves what she got in the end.