This writing is also more poetic than I’m used to and I can’t say I was a big fan of it. It felt like she was telling someone else’s story, not reliving her own.

It does make for a pretty writing style – and it is – but Emily’s emotional turmoil is kept out of reach as a result. This tense always makes it hard for me to feel anything but indifference towards a story and its characters. The main reason for this detachment is due to the fact that it’s written in 3rd person present. It’s a very poetic writing style which on one hand gives us a beautifully written novel, but on the other hand it makes it hard to embed yourself into the main character’s thoughts and emotions. This inventive story, told in verse and in prose, paints the aftermath of tragedy as a landscape where there is good behind the bad, hope inside the despair, and springtime under the snow.Īnd We Stay is a book that will resonate with some, and left others feeling detached. The spirit of Emily Dickinson and two quirky girls offer helping hands, but it is up to Emily to heal her own damaged self. In the wake of the tragedy, an angry and guilt-ridden Emily is shipped off to boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she encounters a ghostly presence who shares her name. When high school senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school library with a stolen gun, he threatens his girlfriend Emily Beam, then takes his own life. Published by Delacorte Books for Young Readers on January 28th 2014

This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I received this book for free from Random House Children's Books in exchange for an honest review. It depicts a Dickinson committed to thinking about the physical constitution of human consciousness and the historicity and materiality of one of its chief modes, language.Friday, JanuReview: And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard Posted by Giselle Combining close readings of poems with contextualizing information about contemporary conflicts in intellectual history, the book contends that Dickinson takes the making of poems to be her philosophical praxis. The argument consults the archives and considers Dickinson's reading, in and out of school, in philosophy, rhetoric, and semiotic theory, as well as her training in inductive science and her familiarity with ideas about electricity, evolution, emotion, sympathy, and the brain. It compares her composition practices, such as variant generation and writing on already-marked scraps, with those of her peers in nineteenth-century American popular manuscript culture, tracing them to the pervasive influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Hume's scepticism, and associationism in philosophy of mind and early neuroscience. This book re-assesses Dickinson's manuscripts, style, and statements to arrive at a historically appropriate conception of poetics.

Emily Dickinson by Melanie Hubbard