Skip to main content

The Sister

The "now" sectionsReads like a horror movie. Grace, our main character, invites Anna into her home because Anna is/claims-to-be the the half sister of Charlie, Grace's dead best friend. Anna is to stay with them for a few weeks while she gets a new job and a new apt.  The few weeks stretch on and on.  Anna quite obviously is sabotaging Grace both at work and at home, doing her best to destroy Grace's already Rocky marriage.  Anna nearly kills Grace by getting the hyper-allergic Grace a hazelnut chocolate.  (Anna then takes Grace's place at a business dinner for Dan, Grace's husband." Grace also is being followed by someone in a red car.

Grace somehow doesn't associate any of this with Anna.  So . . . either Grace is dumb like the horror film heroine or our author has something else up her sleeve.

The "then" sections concern Grace being tormented by one of her "friends.'  She receives nasty letters, a box filled with dog excrement . . . mean girls.  Again, the hints are that it is Charlie--whom Grace trusts and loves--who is doing this to her.  Grace again is obtuse.

Hoping I'm all wrong!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Napoleon 14 Amiens

"Ambassadors are essentially spies with titles."  Napoleon President of Italy . . . Peace treaty with England (Amiens) in March 1802, with Turkey in June 1802 . . . flawed peace treaty with England because there was no opening up of France for trade with England, infuriating the English who thought peace would mean trade. . . tourism, though--Brits come to Paris and admire Napoleon . . . British liberals enamored . . . Napoleon "consul for life" . . . lots of unsettled territories, Switzerland being the largest . . . Industrialization much greater in England than France . . . France in 1802 is about the same as England in 1780 as a manufacturing center . . . Napoleon is basically Anglophobic, complaining of any art work that celebrates English victories being shown in Louvre . . . peace unraveling . . . by 1803 . . .  War May 18, 1803! . . . Louisiana Territory sold, advantageous to both parties.  France gets money; USA gets land.  France avoids possible war with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Puppy, Story by George Saunders

PUPPY  Dysfunctional family has puppy that they need to get rid of.  Mom places ad; family is coming over. Description of family.   Mom:  husband changed from long-haired attractive to stooped old man. Husband: talks constantly of living on a farm and doing what needs to be done, though he never lived on a farm.   Conversations together:   Sell and move to Arizona, get hooked on phonics for kids, buying a car wash. . . wonderful randomness. Straight-laced suburbanite comes to look at puppy.  Seems like she will buy it, even though she is repelled by house.  (Dog turds on carpet, filthy.) She is proud of how accepting she is until she looks out window and sees white trash's son tied by harness to a tree.  Reader knows he is a menace to himself, darting across I-90, for example.  Suburban mother beats hasty retreat, leaving dog to be (probably) drowned by dad who does what has to be done.   Suburbanite remembers her own pathetic ch...
Post a Comment
Read more

Factual basis of American Tragedy: Wikipedia

Dreiser based the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found an overturned boat and the body of 20-year-old  Grace Brown  at  Big Moose Lake  in the  Adirondack Mountains  of  Upstate New York .  Chester Gillette  was put on trial and convicted of killing Brown, though he claimed that her death was a suicide. Gillette was executed by electric chair on March 30, 1908. [1] The murder trial drew international attention when Brown's love letters to Gillette were read in court. Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for several years before writing his novel, during which he studied the case closely. He based Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette, deliberately giving him the same initials.
Post a Comment
Read more