Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
A charming and sometimes painful story of a 16 year-old girl hired to work in Vermeer's household. Her tale is told cleanly, with plenty of interesting details about living in the Delft villiage in the 1660s. Especially successfull in her detailing colors and visual affects, Chevalier manages to keep you turning the pages and wondering where things will go next. Acquired from the Bornschlegel holiday book swap this year - worth a read.
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Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
An epistolary story, about the Island of Nollop off of the southern coast of the United States. The inhabitants are near-worship Nevin Nollop, author of the sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' The sentence is immortalized in town square, and as the story progressess, letter tiles fall off of the monument, and also out of use on the island of Nollop (and thus, out of the novel, as it's a series of letters written there). A cautionary tale on freedom of speech, cleverly written with a great vocabulary. Recommended, for fun.
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