Word: raina
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...Raina appears as an Angel and the Song of Solomon is sung in Craig...
...fired in the crucible of a Christian winter camp that he attends every Christmas. Artistic rather than athletic and unable to pay the skiing fees anyway, he feels outcast by the uniform and exclusionary Christian community there. More importantly, during his junior year at the camp, he meets Raina, a pretty, thoughtful and similarly alienated girl. All at once, along with everything else, the book becomes a charming teenage romance novel. Craig and Raina feel an immediate attraction to one another and the arc of this relationship becomes the book's backbone...
...After camp Craig corresponds with Raina, who lives in Michigan, and eventually coaxes his parents to let him visit her. The entire middle section of the book details this brief visit. Thompson puts a tremendous amount of work into depicting Raina's family life. Her parents are in the midst of a divorce at her mother's behest. Exhausted and possibly addicted to pills, she leaves the care of her two adopted, mentally disabled adult children mostly in Raina's hands. It's a testament to Thompson's intelligence as a storyteller that this sub-portrait becomes as fascinating...
...real drama lies in whether Craig and Raina will have sex. Self-conscious, filled with associations of sex with abuse and punishment - hellish flames lick the background as he puts on his pajamas - Craig feels deeply conflicted. Thompson does a wonderful job of recreating the chemistry between the nurturing Raina and the lonely Craig. You can feel that special, adolescent magnetism that comes from two alienated teenagers. In a key moment, Raina gives Craig a crazy-quilt blanket that she made. In return she asks him to paint a mural on her bedroom wall. In Raina, Craig finds his muse...
...There are few other Harvard undergrads there, so it's a good place to go if you want to get a lot of work done, without the possibility of running into your friends, and procrastinating," Raina said...