Book Review

Pride and Prejudice is the epitome of the enemies-to-lovers trope wrapped in a slow-burn romance, beloved by readers for centuries. In fact, even Jane Austen herself described the novel as “my own darling child.” It’s easy to swoon over the fierce chemistry between the two main leads, but Austen’s novel is chock-full of other protagonist-worthy characters who barely make a dent in the original story.

Take Mary Bennet, for instance. Plain, awkward, and decidedly not rich, with four stunning beauties as sisters and a nagging marriage-obsessed mother, poor Mary seemed to always conveniently blend into the background of any conversation, with that being her sole object in any social outing. In fact, in the original novel she’s only given seven spoken lines in total!

But the self-professed “dull and unremarkable” Mary is to be struck by Cupid’s arrow in Nancy Lawrence’s Mary and the Captain, a feel-good satisfactory novel brimming with unlikely romance, unexpected redemption, and, of course, unfavorable first impressions.

It’s two weeks until Christmas and Mary Bennet is desperate for some peace and quiet–far away from her contriving, gossipy mother who, regrettably, had not been relieved of her fixation to see all her daughters wedded. A nice family reunion at Netherfield with Jane and Bingley seems just the ticket, but Bingley’s cunning sister Caroline throws a wrench into Mary’s plans. Caroline’s brother Robert is smitten with her dear friend Helena Paget (a beauty and lady and heiress, oh my!), and what better way to bring the two together than have them settled in Netherfield for Christmas under her watchful eye?

Captain Robert Bingley comes to Netherfield intent on courting and wooing the lovely Helena, but nothing is to go as planned. There’s an old adage among the enlightened that warns against rooming with one’s best friend for fear of revealing a whole new and potentially unfavorable side of them, and that applies too to staying with the subject of one’s infatuation in close quarters, as Robert finds out soon enough.

As Miss Paget’s true and decidedly less attractive personality masks her outward beauty, Robert becomes more intrigued by shy, awkward Mary Bennet. His evolving perception of Mary mirrors that of the reader, as Lawrence’s firm steering of events and the plot allows the reader to gradually gain a much more favorable impression of Mary than Austen’s meager rendering in the original. Though romance is indeed a significant and appealing motif of Lawrence’s composition, Mary’s personal character development is the true melody that sings out, as always intended.

Mary Bennet had always been more of a self-effacing introvert: “She had never mastered the art of carrying off such social niceties. She would stutter and stumble, or–even worse–sit in strangled silence, unable to conjure up a viable thought to add to a conversation.” And when presented beside her sisters– elegant Jane, witty Elizabeth, enthusiastic Kitty, and lively Lydia–compounded by “being the only plain one in the family,” it’s easy to see why Mary doesn’t offer many agreeable first impressions.

In the original novel, Mary unknowingly embarrasses her family with a poor pianoforte performance at a ball, and demonstrates an inability to read-the-room with her solemn words of “comfort” for Elizabeth regarding her sister Lydia’s elopement: “Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson…”

Interestingly, Austen attributes these moments of social slip-ups to Mary’s “pedantic air and conceited manner,” strikingly similar to Elizabeth originally chalking Darcy’s actions to his pride. But while Darcy’s pride and other failings were eventually forgiven,

with Austen awarding him a happy ending, Mary seemed to be condemned to a loveless life for posterity as “the only daughter who remained at home.”

In today’s literary world, however, the very components of Mary’s situation that undermined her in Austen’s novel–minor character, misunderstood, hazy resolution–gives her the greatest potential to be her own heroine. Nowadays, introverts like Mary are met with more compassion and curiosity than scorn and rebuffs, elevating them from mere character foils to proper protagonists.

Her awkwardness, which, in Pride and Prejudice, had been a subject of subtle mockery, becomes a means of relatability with the reader. Sure, she does bust out a pedantic line or two from the admittedly mundane Sermons for Young Ladies, Volume One when feeling particularly desperate, but her efforts and attempts to be more socially aware gives her an unwaveringly sincere voice that is not at all conceited and instead endears her shy, bookish nature to the reader.

Mary may be a clumsy conversationalist perturbed by strangers and prone to stowing away in the library to avoid them, but she proves she’s more than willing to leap out of her comfort zone when help is needed. And all the reading she’s done has made her an intelligent young woman, whose wits and excellent memory quickly become of great value further into the story. As for Mary’s connection to her piano, Lawrence provides the instrument with stronger symbolic value, turning it into a cathartic outlet for when things go wrong.

As much as Mary’s journey to find her own voice was engrossing, Lawrence may have bitten off more than she could chew by wedging in a secondary redemption arc for Caroline Bingley, the master manipulator herself. Though Caroline certainly had the potential to become an absorbing heroine, Lawrence resorts to the now popular “Disney villain” treatment of a tragic backstory that attempts to make up for all the character’s past offenses. Caroline’s blossoming romance with a kind vicar is also peppered sporadically throughout the story and is admittingly sweet, but its overall ambiguity and vague resolution makes it fall flat satisfaction-wise.

Nonetheless, fans of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will no doubt find Lawrence’s infatuated lovers just as compelling as Elizabeth and Darcy, who unfortunately don’t make a direct appearance in the novel but play an important role nevertheless. However, while Elizabeth and Darcy’s clear chemistry despite, or rather, because of, their contrasting personalities designated them as one of literature’s most popular “ships,” Mary and Robert’s romance is absorbing not because they seemed destined to be together, but because they appeared not.

Their love flickers with the raw, tender passion of patience and trust, burning slowly and steadily to a satisfying ending where our “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” will finally, finally, get the man she deserves.

 

Hetian (Carol) Xu is a rising senior at Amador Valley High School in California. She serves as the editor-in-chief of the award winning school newspaper, Amador Valley Today, and has been recognized by the Scholastic Writing Competition and Goi Peace Foundation for her writing. In her spare time, she enjoys snacking on brownies, watching Korean dramas, and lounging around with a splendid book.

It is a strange experience to pick up a book imbued with death. On lifting When Breath Becomes Air from the library shelf and reading the summary, I sensed a subtle shift in the air — or perhaps within me. I stood beneath the artificial lights, surrounded by the sounds and movements of life, grasping death in my fingers.

Unsettled but deeply intrigued, I leafed through the memoir, feeling the fragments of shattered dreams, relationships, and life permeate the pages. I paused as my eyes fell across a poem, Caelica 83 by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, inscribed in the opening pages:

You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time end bodies, but souls none.

Reader! then make time, will you be,

But steps to your eternity.

The lines beckoned to me like a sliver of light beneath a closed door. Breathless, I turned the knob, descending into the depths of meaning and mortality. Fear, sorrow, joy, confusion, peace enveloped me in waves. Can the presence of death cause such a contrast of emotions? It can, it seems. Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s life, the epitome of juxtaposition, pulled me from the heights of occupational utopia to the depths of mortal uncertainty. Yet, his words dispelled the silence of death, filling it with moving anecdotes from his personal and medical experience.

When I picked up this book, I expected a compelling but technical lecture on dying from a clinical viewpoint. But what I found transcended this presumption. I found compassion where I thought only mechanism occurred. I found hope where I thought only shadows reigned. I found a soul struggling to make sense of life’s meaning in the face of death. And is not that the story of humanity?

When Breath Becomes Air opens a window into the life of Dr. Paul Kalanithi. The son of first-generation immigrants, Kalanithi grew up in Kingman, Arizona. From an early age, his life was cluttered with nature, literature, and a burning ache for knowledge. Kalanithi’s mother, dissatisfied with the curriculum at his public high school, helped ameliorate the syllabus, a factor that aided in Kalanithi’s Stanford acceptance letter. After earning a B.A. and M.A. in English literature and a B.A. in human biology from Stanford, Kalanithi received an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. At this time, Kalanithi realized that he desired “direct experience”; “it was only in practicing medicine,” he writes, “that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy.” By pursuing a path in medicine, Kalanithi hoped to answer “the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.”

After attending Yale School of Medicine, Kalanithi entered a residency program at Stanford. During his internship, he encountered suffering and death — things he had only read about in books — first-hand. In his observations, Kalanithi guides readers through the waiting rooms and the sterilized offices, unveiling scenes of profound loss and quiet hope. Through these raw accounts, Kalanithi sets the stage for his own tragedy. He prepares readers in part one of the memoir for his wrestle with death in part two. When the results arrive, a glaring image of stage IV lung cancer, Kalanithi is under death’s shadow, grappling with his mortality through the words he weaves.

What struck me most about Kalanithi’s writing is the degree of empathy with which he conveys not only his anguish, but that of his patients. In one poignant scene, Kalanithi describes relating the option of brain surgery to a terrified patient. He acknowledges that he could have listed to her “all the risks and possible complications… [documented] her refusal in the chart,” and departed. However, in line with the resolve he made to treat his “paperwork as patients, and not vice versa,” Kalanithi gathers her and her family together, and they discuss the options. In doing this, Kalanithi writes that he “had met her in a space where she was a person, instead of a problem to be solved.”

Conversely, while in the trenches of death, he cautions readers of the “inurement” and objectivity that can arise through this persistent confrontation. Kalanithi entered the field with noble intentions, yet, he admits, he felt at one point that he was “on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor… focused on the rote treatment of disease — and utterly missing the larger human significance.” In the end, technical excellence is not enough. Mechanical words and statistics cannot balm the wound of fearful uncertainty; true healing lies in the relationship between doctor and patient. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I must first understand his mind,” Kalanithi explains. By separating the physical from the mental, the tangible from the intangible, Kalanithi can recognize the patient not as an object, but as a soul, a being in possession of an “identity,” “values,” and knowledge of “what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.” At heart, technical excellence without relationality is like a stained glass window without light. In a society that too often reduces human beings to numbers — the effect of a worldwide prosopagnosia — Kalanithi urges readers to view humanity as a group of individual beings, not a mere collection of data.

Once Kalanithi was diagnosed with cancer, his perspective on death changed. Kalanithi writes:

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely.

Previously, as a doctor, Kalanithi saw death as the force he grappled with to attain several more grains of time. In relation to himself, like many human beings, he viewed death as inevitable but not imminent. Death’s shadow was omnipresent, but it was forgotten amidst achievement, distraction, and the sense of immortality that accompanies the two. But now, as a patient encountering the fatal presence in his own body, he felt it. He tasted it. At the pinnacle of his career, Kalanithi was greeted with his finitude.

And his response?

Finding meaning in the life that remained. To acknowledge one’s mortality is to acknowledge time’s transience. In the face of these two giants, Kalanithi searches for what is significant and what makes his life meaningful. This search results in two significant decisions: the decision to have a child and the decision to write this book.

Kalanithi explains, “If human relationality formed the bedrock of meaning, it seemed to us [he and his wife] that rearing children added another dimension to that meaning.” At heart, this line confirms one of the memoir’s underlying messages: life’s meaning is rooted in relationality. Kalanithi found value in his relationships with his patients, his family, his friends, the world, and God.

When Breath Becomes Air is both practical and deeply personal. It reads as both a guide to living well and a love letter to Kalanithi’s daughter. Death is integral to the memoir, laced between the lines and stamped in the cover Kalanithi never held. Like his life, the book was half-finished; his wife and a team of editors worked to publish it posthumously in 2016. Even so, the memoir radiates with life — as Kalanithi quotes Samuel Beckett, “birth astride of a grave.” In Kalanithi’s poignant reflections and in the promise of his child’s life, death and life compose the pages of the memoir.

When Breath Becomes Air offers readers a new perspective on mortality, an echo of memento mori, and reveals, through Kalanithi’s life experience, how to live and find meaning when breath is still breath.

 

Although of American descent, Abigail Blessing was born in Pakistan and has lived nearly all fifteen years of her life in Malaysia. From an early age, she has been intrigued by the dark and the deep dimensions of life, prompting her to take an interest in topics of art, death, isolation, and morality. When Abigail is not penning stories or essays, she takes pleasure in reading classic literature, wading through nature, playing the violin, and blogging at abigailblessing.com.

 

 

Drums, Girls + Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick centers around Steven, an eighth-grade drummer, whose younger brother has cancer.  Inspired by a past student of his, Sonnenblick set out to write a cancer story that would accurately portray the lives of families with family members who have cancer, particularly the relationship between siblings in that situation.  After reading the book, I would say he was successful in writing a story about cancer that not only let me glimpse into the lives these families may have, but also made me laugh despite the heavy subject matter, and further developed my knowledge on the importance of mental health.

Throughout the story, readers can see how Steven deals with middle school, drumming, mental health, and his brother’s cancer treatment, as well as how the people around him help him.  The aspect of Steven I loved the most was his humor.  He was very sarcastic and the majority of the humor of the book came from his light sarcasm.  Despite the tough situation, he was able to bring some light to it for his family, especially for Jeffrey, who definitely needed something to laugh about as he was only five years old.  Steven even used his sarcastic humor around his friends before he told them about his family’s new situation.

Besides Steven’s humor, I loved seeing his journey with mental health.  While at first he kept his feelings about his brother’s cancer diagnosis bottled up, it was nice to see him eventually trust people with his feelings about the difficulties of being a sibling of a cancer patient.  I personally felt that it was very realistic for Sonnenblick to not have Steven trust people right away, since I can also be reluctant to tell people when I’m having a hard time.  I liked that everyone was willing to support Steven once they realized he was struggling.

His relationship with the school counselor was one of my favorites to see develop.  At first he was hesitant to tell the counselor anything, but he soon trusted the counselor with anything that was troubling him.  With that gain of trust he was able to receive the help he needed.  His counselor definitely gave Steven wonderful advice on how to cope with a difficult situation that anyone could use.  My favorite advice that his counselor gave him was that while he can’t control everything, such as the fact that his brother has cancer, he should focus on what he can control.  That piece of advice definitely helped Steven stress out less about what he couldn’t control and I feel that anyone could benefit from focusing on what they can control, to stress out less.

Of course, the main relationship that the story focused on was that of Steven and Jeffrey.  While they did have an eight-year age difference (something that bothered Steven in the beginning of the story), they still managed to have a strong, loving relationship.  When people were being sad or concerned around Jeffrey, Steven would make sure to keep Jeffrey’s spirits up so other people’s negative energy wouldn’t bring the five-year-old down.  Not only that but Steven made sure Jeffrey didn’t feel like an outcast because of his condition.  The work Steven put into making sure Jeffrey was happy and could have a happy childhood was admirable.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a story with a heavy subject matter that isn’t as sad as other options.  People will definitely learn something about the obstacles that families have, and how they persevere when a relative has cancer —while also having some good laughs.

 

Julissa is a student at Eleanor Roosevelt High School.

 

“You must come for me, Noemí. You must save me.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s bestselling novel “Mexican Gothic” begins with Noemí Taboada receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin Catalina, begging for Noemí to save her from an unknown horror. Noemí heads to High Place, a dark and eerie Gothic mansion in the Mexican countryside. Little does she know what she is about to uncover.

Noemí takes the stage as an unexpected heroine. She plays a noncommittal debutant who switches her college major almost as frequently as she drops suitors. Her chic gowns and glossy lipstick appear more fit for a life of glamorous parties than a seemingly haunted mansion. But it is clear from the start of the novel that Noemí is also an intelligent, nosey woman, talented in unearthing secrets. She will do anything to protect her cousin.

She finds High Place filled with mysteries and horrors, such as the elderly patriarch who ogles her and the old cemetery in the backyard. The hostess keeps an ever-watchful eye on her, and Catalina’s husband exudes a foreboding presence. Haunting portraits decorate the walls, mold grows in corners and servants maintain a sinisterly poised composition.

In a harkening back to Shirley Jackson’s classic Haunting of Hill House, the house itself seems to have its own persona. It invades Noemí’s dreams with visions of gore and violence, and it seems to observe her every move.

The descriptions of the house as a stately Victorian manner play on Catalina’s love for romance novels such as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. Catalina has found her brooding Mr. Darcy and his Gothic mansion, but can she and Noemí survive the horrors it contains?

While the family members keep Catalina under strict surveillance, Noemí’s only friend is the youngest son in the family. He appears to want to assist Noemí in recovering her cousin, but he struggles to discern where his true loyalties lie.

Many mysteries lay buried in High Place. The family’s colossal fortune was built upon the backs of miners, none of whom survived; madness and violence mar the family’s history; and no one has ever escaped the house alive.

As Noemí tries to draw out the secrets of High Place, she finds herself slowly being held captive by its daunting power. She is both haunted by and drawn to the cryptic house.

With Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia attacks the period romance genre and flips it on its head. The book’s feminist use of a heroine in a Victorian mansion is a dark parallel to the Elizabethan romances in which a wealthy estate-owning man saves the female protagonist.

In Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia writes a breath-taking thriller that can be read in a single session. She builds a mystery that the reader uncovers along with Noemí, but upon looking back, the reader can see that the explanations make perfect sense. The ending is shockingly delicious to fans of the genre and will dwell with readers for days afterwards.

 

S.G. Smith is an undergraduate student studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University. Her work has been published in The Journal and Flash Fiction Magazine, and she is the second place recipient of the university’s Jacobson Short Story Award.