By Taylor Jasmine | On October 11, 2015 | Updated March 15, 2026 | Comments (0)
Mandala: A Novel of India by Pearl S. Buck (1970) is unusual among this author’s novels, which are most often set in China or the U.S. In this story, Maharana Prince Jagat and his wife, Moti, learn that that their only son, Jai, has been killed by the Chinese in a border dispute.
The distraught parents wish to bring their son’s spirit home. It’s an exploration of Eastern and Western thinking, how they overlap, and the ways in which they conflict. The plot weaves in the mysticism and mysteries of life in India in a time and place that was contemporary to when the author wrote this book.
Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On October 9, 2015 | Updated September 23, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the 1973 Alfred A. Knopf edition: As in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing is concerned with the situation of present-day women. In The Summer Before the Dark, her treatment of the emotional gulf that opens up before a forty-five year old woman no longer needed as a wife and mother is a starting point for much more — a confrontation with the threat of annihilation, the terrors alf old age and death.
Kate Brown is faced for the first time in twenty years with the prospect of being alone. Her children are grown; her husband, a successful neurologist, is off to America to work for some months in a hospital there.
Urged by him to take a job, she find herself acting as interpreter for an international conference on food, becoming substitute mother to all the delegates, flying off to Turkey for another conference, to Spain for an affair with a younger man — all the traditional outlets. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On July 13, 2015 | Updated September 23, 2022 | Comments (0)
The Vagabond (Translated from the original French, La Vagabonde) by prolific French author Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette), is a 1910 novel telling the story of Renée Néré.
Taking place at the turn of the twentieth century, thirty-three-year old Renée becomes a music hall dancer in Paris after divorcing a cruel and faithless husband.
Not surprisingly, this narrative is based on Colette’s years as a music hall performer and actual experiences with her first husband. The nefarious Willy famously compelled her to crank out the Claudine stories, and then took credit for them. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On June 15, 2015 | Updated September 23, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the 1946 edition, Alfred A. Knopf: In this novel by Willa Cather, Cécile Auclair is a child in the Quebec of the waning seventeenth century, when both Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, Governor of French Canada, and François-Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec, are very old men living their last days.
The city on the rock above the St. Lawrence, though containing only about two thousand souls, retains many Old World characteristics and amenities.
Through Cécile Auclair and her father Euclide, the apothecary protected by Frontenac, Miss Cather recreated the atmosphere, life, and historical events of those days when new men, less influenced by European ideas, had begun to reshape the city’s life and thought. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On June 11, 2015 | Updated March 16, 2018 | Comments (0)
From the 1940 Grossett & Dunlap edition of Chronicles of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery, originally published in 1912: The first thing every young reader will want to know about this collection by L.M. Montgomery is whether Anne Shirley appears in this collection of stories of Avonlea and Spencervale.
She certainly does. As a matter of fact, page one starts off in this manner: “Anne Shirley was curled up on the window seat of Theodore Dix’s sitting-room one Saturday evening, looking dreamily afar at some fair star land behind the hills of sunset …” Read More→
Categories: 
Comments: