Kathi Appelt created a memoir entirely of short, evocative word poems. Her theme is the loneliness and longing she felt for her father as a teenager. All of her poems build on this main theme and only rarely do some of the poems feel a little forced. Some of the poems are quite good, but I like this memoir mostly because it’s so different. Not all memoir has to be a straight story, and I applaud her for trying something so difficult and managing to pull it off so well.
This entry was posted on
September 10, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under books.
Tags: books, memoir
September 15, 2007 at 10:20 am
I’d love to get this from the library, but our town library closed because of lack of funding, if you can imagine! Is it worth buying?
September 15, 2007 at 11:41 pm
I hate to hear about underfunded libraries, or libraries going under. We had no library where I grew up. We had something called a book-mobile, which was a bus that had been converted into a library. The bus driver/librarian watched you like a hawk as you perused the books from the single aisle. It was so demeaning.
I always check books out using the library. If I like them a lot, I purchase them for my shelf, even if they’re still in hardback. Sometimes I wait for them to appear in paperback. The good news about Appelt’s book is that it’s been out for awhile and is now available in paperback; hence affordable. I plan to add it to my collection.
September 15, 2007 at 11:47 pm
From the Amazon link above: “48 used & new available from $0.01″
So that’s even more good news. And if you purchase it using the link from my site, I get ~4% of that penny.