Kindred, as revealed by our past blogs, deals with relationships. The novel relates genres of history with science fiction, past with present, black with white. Although less obvious, Kindred also embodies a relationship between reader and storyteller. Typically, you think of this relationship as a connection between two people: the reader and the storyteller. However,…
Reconnecting the Past with the Present
History repeats its self. This saying gets tossed around casually in everyday conversation. It has become a simple well known fact. History repeating its self is inevitable. Have you ever stopped to wonder why? Kindred, written by Octavia E. Butler, explains this phenomenon in a thrilling, gut wrenching, gruesome, action packed story. Kindred brings up…
Kindred: Back to life, Back to reality.
To quote Soul II Soul, “Back to life, back to reality." Kindred is a very mysterious story. I found myself reliving both Slade House and Coraline, mainly because they all start in reality and quickly become a different, illusory reality. Reading Kindred, I found that this woman, Dana, has a skill (or an illness) that…
Kindred: Adapting to another time
As we leave the “other” world of Coraline behind, we find ourselves being evermore on edge. In my last blog I was discussing the form and genre of Coraline and its diverges from the classic approach to horror. Now, since the story doesn’t involve walking into another reality, it almost feels like a step backward,…
The Voice Behind Coraline
The story of Coraline written by Neil Gaiman is one giant spiderweb, with unsuspecting victims tangled in its deceiving web of lies. I found my heart racing with every chapter attempting to decipher reality. I felt my self-regressing slowly into a child with every page I turned, questioning my knowledge and subconscious. I walked through…
Coraline: The Mystery Behind the Door
Upon reading Coraline we can see now how Slade House and Coraline can be compared as a mystery reading. Why we may ask both are stories that have to be read, analyzed and try to find the means that are hidden between the sentence and the scenes in the book. For instances what is hiding…
Coraline: Seeing through the eyes of a child
For our most recent reading we’re still in the horror genre, and yet, there’s something different. In our last series of blogs we were discussing Slade House. Our last topic was the rhetoric of Slade House and who could the narrator, Norah, possibly be addressing throughout the novel. Now we’re in a whole different territory,…
Coraline: Let’s go through the little door
Stepping into one of Neil Gaiman’s works always feels the same for me. It’s as if I’ve been to this world before —maybe once a long time ago— but now I can’t seem to remember anything about it. It’s sort of like walking through your own house, but everything is turned at a 15 degree…
“Slade House” Blog 4
In Slade House, David Mitchell presents a first person, present tense narration often in the form of stream of consciousness. Why has David Mitchell chosen to write the story in present tense, instead of past tense? I believe the answer to this question to be very simple, Past tense insinuates that the story has an…
“Slade House” Blog 3
By now we realize that Slade House is chock-full of details and messages that are hidden between the lines (or locked away behind tiny, iron door in Slade Alley, only to be revealed every nine years). But what may have been lost upon us, as readers still learning to read, is the connection to other…
Group Four 