Drama

Written by Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply is a novel that tries to raise questions about identity but keeps forgetting to develop them, deciding instead to focus its attention on a boring group of static, shallow characters. The story is told through the eyes of three main characters: we follow Lucy, a student who ran away with her history professor, …

The Miniaturist is a historical novel disguised as a mystery one: its real aim is not to explore the enigma that the title character represents, but to investigate and criticize the Dutch society of the early 17th century. The protagonist is Petronella Oortman, or Nella, a young woman who marries a successful merchant she doesn’t know, Johannes Brandt, and goes …

At the very beginning of The Fault in Our Stars, the protagonist makes a metalinguistic comment about her favorite novel: “it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.”John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars indeed isn’t a book about cancer but a romance populated by characters who must face the prospect of death every day. The difference between genres …

Written by Clare Vanderpool, Navigating Early is a touching novel whose narrative is built on parallels and allegories, whose frequent mixing of fantasy and reality doesn’t quite land, relying heavily on bizarre coincidences to work. The story takes place in 1945, following a trip two boys undertake through a forest in Maine. Jackie, the protagonist, is a 13-year-old boy who …

A tiger never changes its stripes. This is the great problem of flat characters: they do not change, they do not evolve, which may end up giving little purpose to their journeys. They are usually either stereotyped or mnemonic characters, being defined by their one or two notable traits even after the end of their stories. The great sin of …

If it is said a reader lives a thousand lives before they die, how about an author? Telling the life story of Julian Carax, a mysterious writer, and that of Daniel Sempere, the eleven-year-old boy who picks, from the labyrinthine shelves of a forgotten library, exactly the last book written by Carax, The Shadow of the Wind is a novel …