23 November 2005

A Quick Book Review: Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z.

This book was loaned to me by my beloved thug, Kalyne (who I still say is much too young for parts of this book!!) and I finished it today. While I am not gifted in writing poetry and can barely string two lines together coherently in prose, this book was intriguing to me as a wanna-be literary type. I found myself struggling to remember some of the references to famous poets and rejoicing over the prominent place of my absolute favorite literary mind, Emily Dickinson, in the pages of this novel.

The story goes that Annabelle becomes the assistant and then apprentice (a great deal of weight is given in the book to the difference between those two words) to an acclaimed poet and professor at her university. The reader follows Annabelle's awakening to herself as she sees the "other side" of the literary scene in NYC.

I liked the book a great deal, and found that in the last few chapters I was unable to put it down. I will say that it has inspired me to take the running dialogue always present in my head ("scraping my fingernails across the metallic back of the blackberry pager" or "delicately removing the wrapper from the piece of gum, her fingers traced the word wrigley on the piece of green paper" and that sort of babble) and get back into the habit of writing every day...even if it is just on the blog.

1 comment:

Kalyne said...

It is a really great book. I'm not too young, I'm 13 going on 40, remember?

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