Svetlana's Reads and Views

"The Heart of Hyacinth," originally published in 1903, tells the coming-of-age story of Hyacinth Lorrimer, a child of white parents who was raised from infancy in Japan by a Japanese foster mother and assumed to be Eurasian. A crisis occurs when, 18 years after her birth, her American father returns to Japan to reclaim her just as Hyacinth has become engaged to a Japanese aristocrat, and she forcefully asserts her Japanese ties only to find that her prospective father-in-law will not tolerate a white wife for his son. Onoto Watanna creates in her protagonist a young white woman who not only claims a Japanese identity but shifts between her Japaneseness and her whiteness as expediency dictates. In this novel Watanna is on the cutting edge of what we now call race theory, using that theory--of racial constructions and fluidity--in the service of an avant-garde feminism.Onoto Watanna (pen name for Winnifred Eaton) was a popular writer of American romance novels. Daughter of ...

Name of Book: The Call of the Wild Author: Jack London ISBN: 1-57335-405-8 Publisher: Wordsworth Classics Type of book: Alaska, civilization, savageness, wilderness, domination, 1890s?, kidnapping, dog hero, young adult Year it was published: 1903 Summary: Uprooted from the good life of a dog on an estate in California, Buck- the canine hero of The Call of the Wild- is thrust into the turmoil of the Klondike gold rush in America's savage and unrelenting northland. As one critic put it, it is "fierce, brutal, splashed with blood, and live with the crack of the whip and the club." Its place is assured as one of the world's greatest "Ripping Yarns." Characters: The main character in this novel is Buck, a dog that survived through better and worse, who was forcibly sold for gambling debts and ended up in Alaska where he learned valuable lessons about survival. I saw visible change in Buck, from someone who's a domesticated dog to someone...