Her entry begins:
I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, which absolutely blew me away writing-wise from its first compelling sentence:About The Memory of Things, from the publisher:
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
Oh, how I wish I wrote that and pretty much every other sentence in the book.
The story centers on a woman whose staid life falls wide open when she happens upon the unexplainable: the migration of millions of monarch butterflies to her family’s failing Tennessee farm. The book is a magnificent musing on...[read on]
On the morning of September 11, 2001, sixteen-year-old Kyle Donohue watches the first twin tower come down from the window of Stuyvesant High School. Moments later, terrified and fleeing home to safety across the Brooklyn Bridge, he stumbles across a girlVisit Gae Polisner's website.perched in the shadows, covered in ash, and wearing a pair of costume wings. With his mother and sister in California and unable to reach his father, a NYC detective likely on his way to the disaster, Kyle makes the split-second decision to bring the girl home. What follows is their story, told in alternating points of view, as Kyle tries to unravel the mystery of the girl so he can return her to her family. But what if the girl has forgotten everything, even her own name? And what if the more Kyle gets to know her, the less he wants her to go home? The Memory of Things tells a stunning story of friendship and first love and of carrying on with our day-to-day living in the midst of world-changing tragedy and unforgettable pain—it tells a story of hope.
The Page 69 Test: The Summer of Letting Go.
The Page 69 Test: The Memory of Things.
Writers Read: Gae Polisner.
--Marshal Zeringue
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