Broken Glass Park Review

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Broken Glass Park ReviewI'm always on the lookout for new books from Europa Editions - and when I saw this one, I snapped it up.
Alina Bronsky's first novel is hard to put down. It kept me up till one last night. There are so many books out there about murder and violence, but this story starts after the crime. Sascha watched her ex-stepfather Vadim shoot and kill her mother. Now she's seventeen and biding her time till Vadim gets out of jail, so she can kill him.
Her nine-year-old brother Anton thinks she has a good idea. He was there too. So was the toddler of the family, Alissa. They live in the Russian ghetto of Berlin, shunned by most of their neighbors for having such bad luck, but lovingly cooked for and cared for by their fat Russian cousin Maria.
Sascha is brash, angry, fearless, oddly witty, often kind - and brilliant at math, chess and languages. She's not interested in drugs or alcohol, but she sometimes makes aggressive use of sex. In a strange way, even at her most self-destructive, she's working intelligently at repairing her personal damage. Totally likeable, she hardly knows how to handle it when people do like her.
There are lots of other wonderful characters, too, flawed in ways that only make them more interesting. Despite the plethora of broken heads, hearts and windows in this book, the dialog is often quite funny and the mood curiously upbeat.
I have to assume the translation is excellent, because Alina Bronsky comes across as a very fine writer with a truly original turn of mind. Hope she's at work on another book!Broken Glass Park Overview

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Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter Review

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Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter ReviewIn this collection of essays based on speeches and lectures, the author - an admirer of Adorno - poses questions that should concern parents and teachers everywhere: Who decides what is "appropriate" literature for children? How are children introduced to this literature, and what do they make of it?
The first four chapters of the book, peppered with the somewhat off-putting jargon of literary theory, deplore the vertical integration of publishing empires, the marketing of books in association with toys, games, gadgets, T-shirts, etc., which results in "cultural homogenization" of the children. Adults decide "what's good for children" and use literature, among other tools, to manipulate and control them.
In chapters 5-9, the discussion gains momentum by using concrete examples of literature written for children. Changing attitudes toward Grimms' Fairy Tales and the "Struwwelpeter" stories of Heinrich Hoffmann have spawned multiple translations, bowdlerizations, dramatizations and parodies. The author shows how the "sexist" content of most fairy tales (the hero is almost always a male) has triggered feminist re-interpretations. Finally, there is no "authentic" version of fairy tales; all of them, including the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, have been "contaminated", i.e. adapted and collated from multiple sources.
The final chapter on the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter books seems to be the one most American readers have focused on. It stresses the stereotypical aspects of the stories and the commercial hype that attended their release, and, again, their sexist nature - one of the author's pet peeves.
While some of these arguments seem excessively gloomy, all of them deserve our thoughtful consideration.Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter Overview

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