The Giraffe Blog

     I read about a book called Singularity by William Sleator. This book is about a family suddenly inheriting a house from one a relative, one that the mother and father of the twins know little about. After Barry, one of the twins who is more confident convinces his parents to go to “scout” out the house. After looking at the house, they find random animal skeletons, but the skeletons look different from what a normal animal looks like, almost like he pieced random animal bones together.      Later, the twins find a shed that when entered, slows down time. The cautious brother, Harry, does not want to fiddle around with the shed, but Barry forces Harry to make a decision. The twins then find a shocking secret.      Something cool about this story is that it is actually centered in Illinois, where the house is. It is interesting to see the perspectives of Illinois through the eyes of the twins, since they came from Boston. One example of th...

By Tessa Waldhoff I am currently reading Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. I’m near the end of the book, and the whole thing has been a series of twists and turns set in a post-apocalyptic (or maybe just apocalyptic) future. The story is about Rachel, Wick, and Borne, who all live together in an abandoned city ruled over by the biotech bear project gone wrong. Their lives are becoming more and more dangerous and the relationships between all three of them get very tense. It is outside of the zone of my usual reading material, being a combination of adventure and sci fi, but I am enjoying it; the concepts are so bizarre, and it makes for a very entertaining read. Personally, I don’t think the book is overly scary, but I found some of the connections between its world and our world disturbing. Other parts were just creepy and violent, such as  when they interact or fight with “Mord proxies” (monstrous biotech bears) or “changelings” (children who can no longer be considered humans because th...

As a follow-up from Purple Hibiscus, I decided to read another novel by Chimamanda N. Adichie, Americanah. Winning the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in its year of publication (2013), Americanah proves its literary and social value with an immersive narrative and a direct tone that makes the readers feel as though they know exactly what the characters are feeling. The main character, Ifemelu, opens the story as she makes a long-debated decision to return to Nigeria, her home country, after thirteen years of living in America. First time in several years, Ifemelu emails her previous lover from Nigeria, Obinze, who had married another woman several years ago. As Ifemelu and Obinze reflect on their love fifteen years ago, the story travels back to their years at high school and college, filled with romance and personal development of the two persons as they learn from one another. Throughout the first half of the novel, the author switches between the scenes from th...