Dawn Raffel

   Before the reading by Dawn Raffel I didn't have very many expectations.  I was not familiar with the author and I had never been to a reading before.  I half expected that the auditorium would be filled with more people because she sounded like a very successful, well-known author.

   She read from two of her books, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division.  These were intriguing book titles so my initial interest was peaked.  But after the first reading, I was ready to fall asleep.  I thought the maturity level was much higher, so for a person at 19, I was uninterested.  Her audience was filled with much older people compared to that of younger adults, which in my mind implied that her writing was on a more mature level of understanding.

   Her style was very different.  The way she structured the dialogue was weird to me, but for others might be enjoyable.  Even the structure of her sentences seemed a little odd to me.  I couldn't tell if her stories were a little dark or if they were just deep. 

  I was most interested in the questions the audience had at the end.   One man asked if the author saw her life as a series of books.  Other questions pertained to her writing structure and rhythm.  Overall, it was not a bad experience. I would probably go to another reading for fun. 

Stone Soup Review

  In "Stone Soup", an essay written by Barbara Kingsolver, her diction was what drew me into her story!  Her overall piece was appealing personally because I am a "child of divorce".  For me, it was a new perspective I'd never seen.  Some of the phrases she uses and her ideas and arguments were all appealing as I read this essay about families. 

I love her  introduction about sitting down at a soccer game watching the little boy Andy scoring a goal and sees his family cheering wildly for him. On the bleachers next to her there's his mother and her friends, his father & stepmother, stepsister and brother and his grandparent.  And she goes on to say, "I dare anybody to call this a broken home," a mildly aggressive statement that gets you excited for what you're going to read next.

In the following paragraphs you will find her bold opinions strewn about in long paragraphs, her own personal dialogue with her friends, and her main reference to "Family of Dolls" spread throughout her essay.  She's a bit comical, adding that if after your divorce your friends will "accept you back to the ranks of the living", they'll dance at your second wedding if you're really blessed.  She uses phrases like, "once we have put ourselves Humpty-Dumpty-wise back together again" and "Prince Charming Theory of Marriage, a quest for Mr. Right" that made me enjoy her writing all the more and put a smile on my face. 

The ending paragraphs were the best part of it all.  She mentions Cinderella, and how she found a better childhood fairy tale called "Stone Soup", finally revealing why her essay is named "Stone Soup".  She states that every family is a big empty pot and every stew comes out different from the other.  She goes on to say that name calling and suspicions do not do any good and that generosity and respect for variety will help nourish a nation of children.

  "Stone Soup" by Barbara Kingsolver was a very intriguing piece to me.  She used her own experience, divorce, to convey that families are not perfect and you shouldn't judge them because who's to say what the traditional family is?  She seemed to want to make her point clear that just because she was divorced and now a single mother that her life wasn't a mess, she didn't have a problem.  She had many good points to proving that we should let go of this "fairy tale" idea of families and embrace each other in our communities.