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jackelynvb's review
4.0
I liked this novel. I became engrossed in it. But let me say a couple things that bothered me before I explain why I liked it. Though many people wouldn't care about these fine details of the main character's job, I am an ESL teacher at a university, so I care. And I'd like to clear up some misrepresented details.
I feel like this novel romanticized what ESL teachers do. The articles the main character writes are nothing like actual academic ESL articles, which usually focus on models for effective second language acquisition. Fischer has her main character write an article on “Sorrowful Sentences”. You couldn't get that published in any applied linguistics journal that I know of. Not only that, but her students are at a university, which generally means they are from middle-class families who have a fairly good background in English. I don't get war stories or students “escaping their woeful pasts”. They're here to improve their English to get good jobs back home. Something that really ticked me off was the teacher who wrote “Context restrictive, ethnography, and presupposition” on the board. That's ridiculous; it would never happen. That's like a professor telling their students the teaching method they're going to use in a mathematics class. In another language.
Aside from that, I enjoyed the story. The author has an excellent command of dialogue. She made conversations and arguments seem as real as if the reader were accidentally overhearing a stranger's conversation. You wanted to know how the story finished. You felt what they were going through, even if you couldn't sympathize. In fact, I didn't sympathize with the main character, Annie, at all. Now that I've finished and can reflect a little, I think I actually hate her character.
The language in general made the book beautiful. She drew you in and painted the feelings and places and complexities with words so perfectly, that it almost didn't matter what happened so long as she wrote it.
I feel like this novel romanticized what ESL teachers do. The articles the main character writes are nothing like actual academic ESL articles, which usually focus on models for effective second language acquisition. Fischer has her main character write an article on “Sorrowful Sentences”. You couldn't get that published in any applied linguistics journal that I know of. Not only that, but her students are at a university, which generally means they are from middle-class families who have a fairly good background in English. I don't get war stories or students “escaping their woeful pasts”. They're here to improve their English to get good jobs back home. Something that really ticked me off was the teacher who wrote “Context restrictive, ethnography, and presupposition” on the board. That's ridiculous; it would never happen. That's like a professor telling their students the teaching method they're going to use in a mathematics class. In another language.
Aside from that, I enjoyed the story. The author has an excellent command of dialogue. She made conversations and arguments seem as real as if the reader were accidentally overhearing a stranger's conversation. You wanted to know how the story finished. You felt what they were going through, even if you couldn't sympathize. In fact, I didn't sympathize with the main character, Annie, at all. Now that I've finished and can reflect a little, I think I actually hate her character.
The language in general made the book beautiful. She drew you in and painted the feelings and places and complexities with words so perfectly, that it almost didn't matter what happened so long as she wrote it.
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