Review: The Phantom of the Opera

The Paris Opera House is haunted, everyone knows it. Christine Daae is the new hot ticket at the Opera House and the ghost has set his sights on her. However, Christine's childhood sweetheart is back and is offering the phantom some competition. As this early 20th centruy Perisian love triangle plays out we discover who will eventually win Christine's heart.

Title: The Phantom of the Opera
Author: Gaston Leroux
Publication Date: 1909
Publisher: Pierre Lafitte and Cie.
Number of Pages: 360
Where I Got It: Barnes and Noble- Huntersville, NC
Dates I Read It: May 20 - May 27, 2013
Number of Stars: 3.5/5
Read It For: Classics Club Spin #2, The Classics Club

I actually finished reading this book over a week ago, but I have had no drive to write this review because though the book was good, it just didn't stick with me. As you can see, it only got 3.5 stars from me, and that was generous. It wasn't that this was a bad book, it was just not very memorable for me. This book was #6 on my Classics Club Spin #2 which means that it fell into the category of "books I feel neutral about". I started out feeling neutral about this book and I ended it feeling the same way. It was just as I had expected it to be. I wasn't blown away by it, nor did I hate it, it just was. Am I glad that I read it- not really. Do I recommend it- only perhaps to someone who is seeking a degree in French Literature. It was nothing special, and it was only somewhat entertaining.
Everyone knows the story of the Opera Ghost that haunts the Paris Opera House and falls in love with a beautiful singer yet he is so hideous that he can not be with her in his true form. However, sometimes the writing took on a tedious tone. This is especially true when Leroux goes into long descriptions of the Opera House and all of it's underground tunnels and chambers. Another distraction to me with regards to the writing was that at times it would feel rushed and very disjointed. I would have loved more in depth background information about Erik (the Phantom) and how he ended up the way that he did, both physically as well as emotionally. It was extremely difficult for me to feel any sympathy for Erik. Had the reader been given more information on his motives and perhaps some scenes from his point of view, I think that I would have cared more for him and I would have felt more development happen with his character. I began this book having never seen the musical or any televised translation of the book, expecting to feel sympathetic towards the misunderstood phantom; instead, I ended up loathing him. The phantom turned out to be a manipulative kidnapper with a torture room- who is this guy, Christian Grey?!
One thing that I do have to praise about this book is the fact that aside from the long descriptive passages, the book overall did flow very well, especially for a translation. The book had some great elements of romance and suspense yet there was still something very much lacking for me.

Review: The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I expected The Awakening to be a much longer book. For all of the criticism and banning it gets, I expected it to be a pretty hefty book. Imagine my surprise when I was able to read the entire book in one afternoon. Most of my friends on GoodReads gave it four or five stars so I had high expectations. These expectations were so not met.

 

Title: The Awakening

Author: Kate Chopin

Publication Date: 1899

Publisher: Dover Publications

Pages: 116

Where I Got It: Used Book Store

Dates I Read It: May 12, 2013

Read It For: The Classics Club, 2013 TBR Pile Challenge (October Selection- I do realize it's May...Don't ask), 1001 Book Challenge

Number of Stars: 3/5

The story is Edna Pontellier’s and it begins whilst she is on vacation in Louisiana where she falls in love with Robert. Robert feels the same so he sets off for Mexico since Edna is married and has two children. Edna goes back home to New Orleans where she pines for Robert. Soon her husband goes away on business and sends the children to his mothers. For the first time Edna is able to be on her on with just herself and she’s given plenty of time to consider her life and how she wants it to be. Having found a comfort in this independence she moves from her family home to a smaller one around the corner. She soon takes up with Alcee who is somewhat of the neighborhood player, yet Edna holds her own with him only to come undone after her affair with him. Robert returns to confess his love only to realize this mistake. He then leaves Edna a John Deere letter causing Edna to drown herself at the same beach that she first met Robert.

I did not like this book.  I could not relate to the main character at all, which is unfortunate because I should have been able to fully connect to her as someone who has always craved independence myself. Edna was very unlikable. I wanted desperately to be fond of her, but the character development was exceedingly lacking for me.

It was not just Edna that I did not like; I also did not particularly care for the story. I had a high anticipation for this particular book as there are so many positive reviews, it was banned which is always a plus for any book, it was shocking when first published, it was about a young woman’s sexual awakening- what’s not to love? Well, for starters I did not care for the writing style. I normally like the naturalism approach, yet this one bored me to tears. I personally found that the book was not all that shocking. I kept comparing the book to one of my favorite books dealing with marital infidelity: Anna Karenina. While making this comparison I found Anna to be much more shocking. I felt connected to Anna and Vronsky and Daisy and every single character in Anna, yet I can barely even remember the characters names in The Awakening (and not just because they were French/Creole!). There was not much story to the story. It felt like the book built to a crescendo only to let the reader down in the end. I wanted to feel more remorseful over Edna’s suicide, yet I just didn't care enough about her, or any of the other characters really, to give a damn. I did really like the one part where her husband thought that she was going crazy and got a good chuckle out of that, but that is about it. There was no anticipation to the novel for me. It was a page turner, but only because I wanted it to be over with. If the book were longer, I probably wouldn't have finished it. I did end up giving the book three out of five stars (it was okay) only because of the impact that the novel had on feminism and feminist literature. I’m just grateful that all feminist literature are not like this one. 

Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was my January book from my 2013 TBR Pile Challenge as well as being a book on my Classics Club Challenge List.

Growing up in the South and reading and relating to a story like To Kill A Mockingbird is what I believe little girl readers did in the North with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The book is a coming of age tale of precocious Francie Nolan who is eleven years old in 1912 and is as poor as is expected of any immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. The novel follows Francie and her family from 1912 to 1916.

Title: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Author: Betty Smith
Publication Date: 1943
Pages: 483
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers
Where I Got It: The School Library I Work In
Dates I Read It: January 5 - January 18, 2013
Number of Stars: 5/5



I loved this book. I was smitten with Francie from page one and I didn't stop loving her despite her awkward adolescent years and her sometimes frustrating choices. Picking up the book was never a chore for me and I often found myself longing to be curled up on my couch with my friend Francie. I loved each character in this story despite not being able to relate to a single one of them (except, of course, Francie). I love a good Immigrant story and that's exactly what this is. Francie and her brother Neely are second generation Americans living in Brooklyn born of an Irish Father and an Austrian mother. The family is dirt poor as the father is a drunkard and the mother works entirely too hard for a woman to provide for her family and invents games to play when there is literally no food in the house for weeks at a time. I kept picturing Francie as a young Sophia Petrillo as the only previous notions I had of Brooklyn came from Sophia's character on the television show The Golden Girls and her frequent rants about the old days which started with "Picture it, Brooklyn, 1912.."
The story is very much character-driven and there is little to no action in the entire book. It is about the day to day lives of American families doing their best to survive in war time (WWI breaks out two years into the book while Francie is working for a newspaper company) with no money and difficult jobs. I read this book for almost two weeks and one evening Geoff asked me about it saying that a friend of his read it in high school and hated it. It would be a difficult read for a boy as there is no action and it is the story of a girl coming of age. However, as a girl who came of age (albeit not in the early 1900s), I could relate a lot to the struggles of Francie and I could easily sympathize with several life moments that she had to go through during the course of the novel. Things like losing a first love, death, the loss of dreams and hopes and the fact that women are at a disadvantage to men, especially in areas like education and the workplace.
Betty Smith does have a knack for writing and I had serious suspicions that this was more memoir than fiction for her. After I finished the book this morning (thank goodness for a teacher workday that I opted out of) I went online to read about Ms. Smith and discovered that most people believe that this was the story of her own coming of age. The emotions were so true and she was able to capture a moment perfectly that it would be very surprising if the events of the novel were not something that she had lived through herself.
The novel caused me to both laugh out loud and cry, especially the ending. I found myself being nostalgic for my youth more than usual while reading this book, much like a grown-up Francie does at the end of the novel. I don't want to ruin the ending, but Francie leaves us on a high note with recaptured hopes for her future, which in turn made me reevaluate my own future and have hopes that perhaps I, too, could one day recapture some dreams I once had but forgot due to the pressures of bills and the day to day grind of life.