First off, WHAT was I reading.

Second off, WHAT was that ending.

I haven’t read anyone’s posts or watched the video(s?) yet so I am writing this while trying to find my way in the world. My way? Yes, my way, because what exists is the way and what exists is the world…

I teetered between anger at and trying to appreciate the prose in this novel. I think it’s definitely a daring choice but in a way it bothered me because it seems all over the place, which I know is the point… probably. Honestly, I think it was difficult to get through because I was just frustrated and felt like I couldn’t track what the tone of the novel was other than sad and introspective. It picked up once more characters got involved and we met Quimet 2.0, and once Macabéa was named I could flesh out her character a bit more in my mind because she spoke and I liked hearing her thoughts. This helped establish her in her world but even before that we got glimpses of her and that beautiful moment of her being “f-r-e-e!” (33). I think this stream of consciousness and author as an involved character definitely made for an interesting choice and almost made the audience more removed from the characters and their lives because the readers weren’t in it, in a sense.

Okay but I don’t want to bash things or choices that the author made because I knew that it would be a bit different going in and I want to be a happy and optimistic person and not a hater but um yeah I feel bad giving books less than 4 stars and I rated it 3 stars on Goodreads. There were definitely some memorable quotes and I did like the author involvement and the talk about writing and being responsible for a character in a way.

Because we talked in class about screams for The Time of the Doves, I think the mention of “the right to scream” (5) stuck out to me at the beginning. Obviously I suspected that this would not be a very happy story going into it and I thought the novel ending in silence and rain, as was mentioned earlier in the book, was quite poetic because it tied back that theme and title of being unable to scream and yet having everything to scream about.

My question for the class would be: is a scream a right? A compulsion? A nuisance?

Memorable quote: “You know what I want more than anything else in the world? To be a movie star” (45)

I seem to have established a format with my blogs and my titles that I would not like to break because of consistency but here’s some emojis in an attempt to not to make this boring:

That’s all for now.

Peace,

Maia