4/27/97

I finished reading The Greenbook by Jill Paton Walsh a short while ago. It's a short read, enjoyable, and neatly tied into several reccent topics on Child_lit. Here are some of my observations to share.

1. It is a "frame" book -- in which the book the reader is reading is the Green Book referred to in the story.

2. It is told from a very interesting perspective -- a combination of 1st and 3rd person narration. You hear the narrator saying "WE" without telling you who the narrator is (of course, I had suspected all along which character this narrator might be and proven correct at the end) and yet the narrator at the same time refers to her/his charactor in 3rd person and very little, if any, exploration of any charactor's mind takes place.

3. It contains several "literary allusions" -- though most of those allusions are about how poorly the colonists from Earth (yeah, it is a Sci-fi) have chosen the books to bring to the new planet. (Robison Crusoe was condemned, and Homer's classic is deemed boring; an abridged/updated version of Grimm's fairy tales is valued but criticized as well.)

I will include this book in my growing list of "Fiction exploring the art and nature of storytelling".