The Passion of Dolssa

Too many young adult books have annoying characters.  I've read a number recently and even good ones seem to have that fault.  This book differs from the genre in that it doesn't take place in high school.  In fact, it takes place in the 1200's.  It deals with Dolssa, a healer who is taken to be a heretic.  Botille and her sisters hide her from a persistent man Friar Lucien who is hunting her.  Soon she is healing again and the hunt for her becomes easy.  I welcomed this historical fiction book.  It was certainly different than the other young adult books I've read.  I applaud the change.  Young adult publishers need to get more books like this in print. This is a book about characters who don't even know prom is.  It's refreshing.  

The Blacker the Berry

This was another book from the Harlem Renaissance.  I didn't care for the main character Emma Lou as I found her snooty.  I was involved though with the book and finished it in a short time.  It's about Emma Lou's struggle to find a place where she belongs.  Her skin is too dark for the African Americans around her and the Caucasians. She goes to college for a few years.  Then she goes to Harlem where she falls for a loser player called Alva.  He even has the gall to tell her she is imagining the discrimination.  However, you as a reader see it happening everywhere around her.  The reader is frustrated by some of her actions like her quitting college and going back to Alva.  However, the ending left me satisfied.  

Borges: A Life

It's kind of weird that I chose to read this whereas I've never read one of his books of short stories.  Nevertheless, I picked it up on the shelf and read it.  It's cool that a high school dropout was able to become one of South America's best writers.  However, Borges comes across as very smart and determined.  He sent his work to millions of places, not over that he started many literary magazines himself.  This book also goes over all of the trials in his life: his blindness, his hatred of the Perons, and his several unrequited crushes.  The most frustrating of which was the writer Norah Lange.  She was a woman clearly in love with another man.  Whenever the man dumped her she went right back to Jorge only to go back if the man showed the slightest interest.  I felt like telling Jorge she's not into you.  This book made me read The Aleph which I reviewed earlier.