Posts filed under 'Historical Fiction'
“The Count of Monte Cristo” Student Reviews 2009
The following reviews by COHS students are on “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexander Dumas.
Genre: Historical
Pages: 1312
Reviewer: Ron W.
The story begins when the main character Edmond Dantes and Fernand Mondego land on the island of Elba to get medical help for there captain. Dantes meets Napoleon Bonaparte and is given a letter which is to be given to a friend back at port, but the friend will find him to get the letter. Mondego who is jealous of Dantes and his fiancés Mercedes relationship turns him in to the police. After Dantes explains himself to the head prosecutor Gerard Villefort who decides to send Dantes the life imprisonment in the Château d’If. After befriending the priest the priest teaches Dantes to read and write. They start to dig a tunnel out of the prison but the priest is caught in a cave in and dies Dantes then escapes by pretending to be the priests dead body. After escaping he befriends a group of buccaneers and sails back the his home port. After he and another man by a boat they sail to Monte Cristo a small island and find the hidden treasure. When they return home Dantes starts calling himself the Count of Monte Cristo. While he is doing this he is slowly ruining all of the people who hurt hims lifes. Until all of them are in jail and Mondego is dead.
My opinion of the Count of Monte Cristo is that it was a very adventurous and suspenseful book. The storyline was odd but all together the long read was worth the effort. If I had to recommend a book it would be this one.
1. The author wrote this book I alive so that you can learn that you can’t trust all your friends even the close ones.
2. The theme is you can’t judge a book by its cover even if you have already read it.
3the author supports the thesis by using a lot of good quotes and a really suspenseful storyline.
4. The issue is Dantes going to jail for carrying a letter to a friend of napoleons and it is resolved when dantes pays every one back for their deeds.
1 comment June 3, 2009
“The Man in the Iron Mask” Student Reviews 2009
The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 588 of the story, and 626 pages including explanatory notes.
Reviewer: Christian I.
The Man in the iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas is an excellent novel. It is about King Louis, and he is making France fall apart from his poor ruling as king. Three retired musketeers want to get rid of the king, after he put one of the musketeer’s sons on the front line of war. D’Artagnan, the musketeer captain, thinks otherwise, and is trying to defend the king. The other three find another heir to the throne, and that is the man in the iron mask. The man in the iron mask is King Louis’s twin brother, Phillipe. The musketeers then train Phillipe to fight, just in case if he needs to defend himself. King Louis then hosts a party, and the musketeers make the switch. Although, a loyal friend of the King breaks him out of jail, and Louis resumes being king. Parthos and Arimas the escape to Belle-Isle, where the King sends an attack. D’Artagnan resigns from the military, and helps his friends. Parthos dies during the battle of Belle-Isle, and D’Artagnan died a few years later from a war with Holland. At the end, the only original musketeer alive is Aramis.
As I said in the summary, I think The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas is excellent. It has an action filled story with a hint of mystery. This novel is considered a world classic, and is a French novel. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a good book to read.
1. The author wrote The Man in the Iron Mask to show how two brothers can be different and what they will do for their country.
2. The theme of the book is right versus wrong. The king is a tyrant, and his twin brother (the man in the iron mask) knows what is right for France.
3. The author supports the thesis in many ways. In the book, three musketeers have to do a wrong action, to save France from the tyrant. They also did what was right by not killing the tyrant. D’Artagnan conflicts whether or not to help his friends or the king. The author uses many other examples to support this thesis.
4. The main issue is that the king, Louis, is a tyrant. Three of the original 4 musketeers had enough of the king’s tyranny. They discover that there is another heir to the throne, and they secretly switch the two, making France have a fair and kind king.
Add comment June 3, 2009
“The Ginger Tree”
The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd (294 pp.)
When Mary Mackenzie is sailing from Great Britain to China in order to marry her fiancé, she finds herself feeling restless. Her chaperone is too rigid, and Mary must even hide the fact that she is not wearing her corset under her clothing despite the fact that the humidity and heat are greater then anything she ever has ever before experienced.
Mary arrives in Peking; weds in the Church of England (although she refuses to drop her Presbyterian roots) and upsets the people who know her husband; finds her husband is a tight wad and cannot understand why he married her. She is seated near Kentaro at a few formal dinners and tries to draw him out. On a vacation with her friends, Mary bumps into Kentaro praying at an abandoned temple. They have brief affair which leaves Mary pregnant. Richard, her husband, is gone on a secret mission as military attaché.
When Richard returns home to find Mary pregnant, he throws her out of the house, not allowing her to ever see her daughter again. The rights of women (or lack of them) are a central theme in this book. We see how Mary is treated by the British, the Chinese, and the Japanese. Mary falls under the protection of Kentaro, who believes it is his duty to support her. She becomes his “second wife,” but this arrangement still leaves her at the will of a man. He comes and goes according to his schedule. When the baby is born and has Japanese features, it seems Kentaro is content and visits and loves the baby.
However, one day, the baby simply “disappears.” This is the work of Kentaro. He believes the baby will be better off raised in an adoptive family. A family would be easy to find since the child has royal blood. Mary would never have agreed to this scheme and has been left out. When one of the maids, a woman who took part in the scheme, comes back to Mary’s house while she is away in order to collect some belongings, Mary wrestles her to the floor and demands information. The newspapers later say that Mary tried to murder the maid.
Mary decides that she cannot live under the protection of Kentaro since he has taken her son. However, she cannot leave Japan because she hopes to learn something of her son and his fate. The rest of the book is about her search for independence as a foreigner women in a man’s Japan, her opportunities to get back in touch with her daughter and her son, and the difficulties of maintaining relationships as World War II arrives.
This is a good read for budding feminists and for students who want to read (loosely) historical fiction or who wish to start with fiction and then do research on the historical period/setting of the book.
Add comment May 29, 2009
“Fallen Angels”
“Fallen Angles” by Walter Dean Myers
309 pp.
Richie Perry is an African-American boy who goes to Vietnam. His experiences there change his perception of the world. On his first day out, another new recruit is blown apart when he steps on a mine. A favorite understanding officer, Lieutenant Carroll, is killed a few months later. Soon after, a favorite companion, Brew, has his leg ripped open and dies during the evacuations as Perry holds his hand. Perry also finds that he often does not understand who is the enemy and is frightened of some of the villagers as they may be part of the Viet Cong. On one trip to a local village to search for VC, a woman hands a baby to a GI. The baby explodes, killing the GI. Other soldiers then kill the women and the other child who was with her.
Periodically, Perry is bored. There often seems to be racial tension in his platoon although it is never explored.
Among his other gruesome experiences, Perry is wounded twice. The book has a lot of suspense and excitement. The view of a young soldier seems to be realistic. Someone interested in what the Vietnam War was like or even what it feels like to be a soldier would “enjoy” reading Fallen Angles. This would work for projects requiring you to began with loosely historical fiction, but you can’t have a weak tummy. War is gorey.
Add comment May 15, 2009
“The Rock and the River”
The Rock and the River
by Kekla Magoon
1968: Racial tensions are escalating in cities across America, including fourteen-year-old Sam’s hometown of Chicago. The struggle for racial equality has even divided Sam’s own family—his father is a civil rights activist, but Sam’s older brother, Stephen, a.k.a. Stick, has joined the Black Panthers. Sam respects his father, but as he sees an increasing number of violent acts perpetrated by whites against blacks, he begins to think that Stick has the right idea. Author’s note.
JLG Review: The Rock and the River provides a fresh take on the civil rights movement. Rather than writing only about the division between blacks and whites, debut author Kekla Magoon concentrates on a less-explored aspect of the time period, the split between blacks who practiced nonviolent resistance and those who attempted violent revolution.
NOTE: COHS Titans–The above review is excerpted from the Junior Library Guild. (Meaning that I didn’t write it and don’t want to take credit from something I didn’t do!) We belong to the Junior Library Guild and purchase four books from them each month, so we have access to these reviews. I’m going to start posting excerpts from the reviews in the hope that you will see what great books we get from JLG–and come check them out! If you want to read the whole review, ask your English teacher. I have made copies for him or her to post in the classroom.
Add comment April 21, 2009
Ahab’s Wife or, The Star Gazer
Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund is the perfect book for the junior English project that starts with a work of fiction. It’s rich with historical as well as fictional characters and takes on several of the social issues of Antebellum New England and America—Transcendentalism, religion (in Unitarianism and Universalism), the rights of women, and slavery. Even so, it’s not a book that all high school students will be able to read. At nearly 700 pages, it’s much longer than the books most read. The old-fashioned writing style and the wood-cut images are delightful in that they pull the reader into the 19th-century New England of the novel, but it is a technique unfamiliar to many students.
For those of you who are good readers, do read Ahab’s Wife. You’ll find adventure as Una, the protagonist runs off to sea aboard a whaler, which sinks after a run-in with a whale (Yes, the book has a connection to Moby-Dick and Una is that Ahab’s wife). She survives the shipwreck, but must live with the dark secret of cannibalism. You’ll meet, if only briefly, many literary giants of the period—Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Nathaniel Hawthorne, disguised as one of his own characters (“The Minister’s Black Veil”). Any of them will make an interesting subject for later research as will Frederick Douglass, whom Una hears speak. There’s plenty of romance and heart break as well. Though Una seems a bit modern for her time (she easily accepts her neighbor’s homosexuality), she is a bold and kind woman at once, and has characteristics we all would like to emulate.
1 comment November 6, 2007
The Known World
The Known World by Edward P. Jones is a wonderful book for any reader; fortunately, it also works nicely into some of Colony High’s reading requirements. Taking place in Antebellum Virginia (about 20 years previous to the Civil War), the novel has a historical element that makes it a perfect choice for the junior research project which requires a book of fiction as a beginning. At nearly 400 pages, its length serendipitously equals the length students most frequently request. Best of all, this is a book for critical thinkers as it explores the complex moral ground of slave owning.
Henry Townsend owns 33 slaves and 50 acres in Manchester County, Virginia. He is also Black and a former slave himself. His father, Augustus, purchased himself, his wife and Henry from their master, William Robbins. Robbins has a special fondness for Henry—one might say he loves Henry as a son. Because of this, the two maintain a relationship over the course of their lives. While Henry becomes a shoemaker, Robbins helps him to buy his first slaves. Robbins’ relationships are complex. He loves a black woman and has children by her, but he can be brutal to his slaves.
Henry’s relationship with his own father is strained. The elder Townsend maintains a moral ground against slaveholding and doesn’t visit his son. Henry’s wife, Caldonia has parents who also own slaves and consider them their children’s legacy. Meanwhile, Caldonia’s brother would like to free his future slaves, putting a strain on his relationship with his mother. For all the Blacks—slave and free—life is tenuous. At one point, a slave trader decides to eat the ‘free papers’ of a Black man and then sell him cheaply as a slave to anyone who won’t ask too many questions.
When Henry dies unexpectedly, Caldonia is not capable of keeping the plantation in order. She depends on the head slave for emotional support—while he hopes that she will free him and marry him–and things fall apart. The many vivid characters will keep you involved in The Known World.
Add comment November 6, 2007
The Red Badge of Courage
When I was asked to discuss The Red Badge of Courage with this year’s Academic Decathlon team, it had been at least thirty years since I’d read it. I figured another reading was in order if I hoped to be of any help to the team members. I had only remembered one scene with any clarity—that of the protagonist, “the youth” or Henry Fleming, coming to an opening in the woods to find a corpse. The reason I remembered it well was that there were ants crawling on the lip of the dead man. This was the first time I had read a book that realistically portrayed battle.
The fact that The Red Badge of Courage is one of the first American novels to portray battle realistically is part of the reason it has such staying power. Most critics wouldn’t call it a truly great book, and yet it was, artistically—stylistically–something new and striking when published in 1895. I believe it’s still worth reading and can be a great choice for several COHS projects.
The Red Badge of Courage will work for any assignment which requires historical fiction. If the assignment goes further—as does the Junior Project—in asking that you do research on the time period in which the fiction takes place, then the Civil War is a good choice. It’s interesting, there’s a lot of easily accessible information about it, and it’s one of the most important events in the history of the country. Equally, The Red Badge of Courage is a good choice for literary analysis. You can discuss Realism or Naturalism and examples abound. You can make a careful contrast to Romanticism if asked to write a paper comparing and contrasting.
Basically, The Red Badge of Courage details the events in one battle–presumably the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, near Richmond, in 1863. (Although the novel never states this, there are many geographical clues.) The battle is seen through the eyes of an untried young soldier. After a first skirmish, the youth becomes afraid and flees the battlefield, running through the woods. He is ashamed and doesn’t know how he will manage to return to his regiment. He is struck in the head with a rifle butt by another disoriented soldier and wounded. This ‘red badge of courage’ enables the youth to return to his regiment under the pretense that he was wounded in battle. He then has the opportunity to show his mettle.
In discussing the novel, you have many themes to choose from—man v. nature, the individual v. society, coming of age, appearance v. reality, and alienation and loneliness. However, the thought I’ll leave you with is from critic Sharon Cumberland: “The Red Badge of Courage is a study in what a rational person can do in an irrational situation.”
3 comments October 17, 2007
