This is one of the best of Dickens’ works, in my opinion. True, it starts off heavy and bleak, but Mr. Squeers and Dotheboys Hall do play a significant rôle throughout the book. If anything, the digression involving Mr. Crummles and his performing troupe could have been omitted without loss to the story.
Our kids were already a bit old for the Harry Potter books when they emerged in 1997. At that time we moved in rather narrow-minded circles and stories of witches and dark magic were frowned upon. So we never read them. Until now. As a would-be author, I can hardly ignore successful writers like J.K….
As a tame introduction to the work of Jean Racine, this adaptation is most helpful, presenting the plays in abridged form and in contemporary English. Unfortunately, they thereby lose some of their claim to fame as “masterpieces of one of the greatest literary artists known”. Both plays follow the biblical narratives rather closely, while adding some…
Did you know that Jesus experienced sexual temptation? See below. Down relates Jesus’s life chronologically, including almost all the details from the gospels and adding occasional human touches, such as His heart searching concerning His identity and mission, and that He had a friend near the Jordan at whose house He stayed several days. Such…
The premise of this book is intriguing: Ariel, a Jewish priestess and niece of King David, is sent on a mysterious quest by the angel Raziel. Not to a far-off country, but to a period a thousand years later, at the height of the Roman Empire, and shortly after the Crucifixion of the Jewish Messiah. The customs…
This is a very unusual book – both as regards the theme and the style. Two WWI soldiers experience the horrors of war, slaughtering mercilessly and seeing their comrades slaughtered. Each one finds himself alone in the most devastating conditions on a mountainside in the Romanian Carpathians. All of their respective companions have died –…
Isa and her young family emigrate from the tiny Orkney island of Raumsey to Alberta, where her parents are already living. An unfortunate young English girl, Sarah, happens to arrive at the same time, destined to marry a friend of her father’s, who is much older than she. The vastness of the prairie environment and…
This book, number 5 in the Raumsey series, not only portrays the horrors of WWII through the eyes of simple, ordinary participants, but sheds a sidelong glance at the morality of a war initiated at some high level, far away from those who are forced to carry it out without understanding why.
Eldredge has hit on something big! He dares to turn his back on the common modern Christian perspective on society (esp. masculine roles) and explore the deep, real motives and needs of men. His analysis is rather one-sided (e.g. every man carries a wound given by his father P.60) and so is his remedy: accept…
Flame in the Night by Heather Munn is a captivating drama about the resistance movement in occupied France during WWII. Teenage scouts conceal Jewish children from the Gestapo in remote farms, attics, treetops and caves. Meanwhile, all around them everyday life continues as usual: cultivating vegetables, going to school, shovelling snow, attending church. Plot An…
Scandalous rumours and immoral men do their best to ruin May Rose Long’s life. But she strives to remain honest and chaste. With neither home nor money, she even adopts the forlorn wild teenager, Wanda, before realising she is her fugitive husband’s daughter. The book is well written and paints a realistic picture of the social…
It’s a bit strange for a Jerseyman to watch a film about WWII Guernsey in Switzerland. As can be imagined, the audience was small. I was pleased to discover a war film with a difference: no explicit brutality and no sex.