I stumbled upon ‘It is what it is’ by chance while I was reading the poetry collection called ‘Bone’ by the author.
Bone is a hard hitting collection of prose and poetry by the author. It is what is it finds a place in the collection almost as if it was written for Bone.
The story is about two siblings who have a fall out from the family. The dad leaves the mom. The mother plucks the two children and leaves for a new home. However, home it was not. They found mice in the kitchen of the new place. It was actually rats but they preferred to call it mice so they feel little better. Few days later a strange smell started lingering in the house. Soon enough the authorities took the children away placing them in two different homes.
The girl went to Aunt Delle and the boy to a distant uncle. In the story the girl narrates what it was like to live with her aunt. She was only allowed to go to school apart from church and nowhere else. She missed quite a few sleep-overs and birthday parties. Their only fun activity was to distribute pamphlets around the community. Children saw her and thought she was a freak.
All this while she was happy for her brother who played sports, got one of the ears pierced, was practically living his life. He has a lot of friends too which the girl is quite short of. She missed him too much.
The siblings have their own rage and coping mechanism.
They meet at their fathers funeral after a long time. The boy spits on the body and the girl hurriedly leaves with her brother so as to not lose a step.
This is the story of growing up in broken homes. I quite liked the storytelling here. Felt a lot personal.
Yrsa Daley-Ward Is an author to look out for. I for sure am reading more stuff from her in near future. In the meanwhile, look out for the review of Bone from us.
“You see,” he continued, “as long as the things in your room have energy, they will always descend into chaos. The only way to get rid of entropy is to reduce the temperature to absolute zero…two hundred and seventy-three degrees below freezing.”
I tried explaining the theory to Aunt Delle, who hated anything scientific. She pulled me out of Sunday school right away and made me go into Big Peoples Church, with all the adults. If I was old enough to understand that nonsense, she said, I was old enough to lead prayers and do scripture readings.
Go ahead, grab yourself a copy of On Snakes and Other Stories and tell us what you think about the book! If you are a Kindle person, ensure to select the Kindle edition of the book.
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