Word: janee
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...Horatio Hornblower and that island-bound explorer of the sky, Tycho Brahe. The towering absence of Saskia's barely-remembered father, a Danish sailor named Thomas, fills her imagination with images of captains, the sea and Northern lands; the towering presence of her beautiful and world-wise best friend, Jane Singh, fills her dreams with images of willowy, "dusky maidens" welcoming Saskia the Wanderer into distant ports. Carefully balanced between worlds, with the imaginative richness of her inner ocean just managing to stave off the outside world of adolescent rebellion and incipient high-school geekdom, Saskia's mental dialogue with...
...narrative to the reader that makes the book consistently interesting and enjoyable to read. The body of the plot takes off in the second part when Saskia receives a letter from Thomas in Denmark inviting her to come spend the summer hiking north with him. Saskia and Jane take off for the land of the Phaiakians (the name of a god-like race in the Odyssey, whom Saskia in typical fashion maps onto her father's unknown people). The rest of the novel evolves into a series of journeys, both literal and metaphoric, which could be mapped...
...other, the "salty" nature of adolescent sexuality. Hall deserves commendation for apparently realizing that emerging adolescent awareness of sexuality is not a monolithic experience and for portraying it in Saskia in a way unique to and coherent with her character. Saskia has a homoerotically charged relationship with the beautiful Jane from the first, and discovery of sexuality, both same sex and hetero-sexual, quite clearly mark stops on Saskia's journey toward finding herself. Hall even manages to write both honestly and tastefully of another such stop, masturbation...
...Criminal Hearts," a play by Jane Martin, begins and ends with a blackened stage. The play never moves along either. The characters begin in an absurd and implausible situation which never resolves satisfactorily...
...trained as a teacher; we wing it, and get our inner-city kids into New England's best high schools. The job is intellectually challenging--I still get to talk about literature every day, but now I get to plug it into real life. For these kids, Jane Pittman is their grandmother, and The Outsiders happens across the street...