pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

This memoir by a local author and professor at my local university comes highly recommended, and at a glance the subject looks fascinating, too. (Sometimes – I might even say often – excellent writing carries a subject I’m not consumed with; but better to have both.) A brief blurb reads, “For readers of Refuge, A Civil Action and Silent Spring, comes a harrowing story of a family, a body, and a place: an immigrant family in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, a hauntingly beautiful, hauntingly compromised landscape.” Who is not intrigued? And those titles cited for comparison: wow!

It begins:

In nineteen question-mark question-mark my silent grandfather came to the United States.

He left the hot chatty island of Barbados and because he existed in silence no one knows when he came.

Simple, but a lot has already been communicated; and I love the “hot chatty island.” I am optimistic.

Filed under: book beginnings | Tagged: creative nonfiction, memoir, nonfiction |