The Boy Who Said No, An Escape To Freedom Patti Sheehy Oceanview Publishing Historical fiction The Boy Who Said No is a novelised version of the true story of a young man's escape from Cuba to the USA . Frankie is a young teen when Castro comes to power in Cuba and the story details the harsh reality of life under the dictator's policies. The prior regime may have been corrupt, but Fidel's policies bring greater suffering for the majority of people, at least from Frankie's point of view. As time progresses it become more and more clear that things are not going to get better. Some think the Americans will come and rescue them, but that hope soon fades. Frankie is clever and is taken away to join a special forces unit in the army. He has no choice in the matter, but becomes highly skilled at his job, the top guy in the team. He finds it hard, however, not to occasionally speak his mind about the huge gap between what the party tells them is true (eg that the people are … [Read more...]
Fiction with meaning
In a recent post I talked about literature as being not so much a genre as a description of quality within a genre. I based that post on the Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of literature, but the term is also often used to refer to writing that has some sort of meaning, often a social, political or spiritual comment. Literature is thought to raise issues and that’s one of the reasons why people like to use the term literature as something separate to popular fiction which often does make no attempt to impart meaning. However, just because some popular fiction doesn’t impart meaning doesn’t mean that all popular fiction is devoid of meaning, or that lack of meaning is necessarily a mark of the category. Take The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. You could consider it literary young adult dystopian because despite what you may think of it personally it is well written it has a powerful emotional effect on readers it makes a political statement The political statement gives … [Read more...]
