Nicole's Short Story Blog

When we read Recitatif I didn’t think too much of the title I figured it had something to do with the story but as the story went on we were never introduced to that word. I thought it was interesting to look into according to Wikipedia “"Recitatif" is the French form of recitative, a style of musical declamation that hovers between song and ordinary speech, particularly used for dialogic and narrative interludes during operas and oratorios”. This sort of makes sense because the structure of the story is somewhat random and sporadic. We get this sense that it's not quite a normal story. However, I don’t really see a strong connection to the music aspect of it and I am not sure if the french part plays into it so I would like to propose an alternate title. Les mystères des souvenirs (the mysteries of memories). Sorry if that’s not how you actually write in french I took Spanish so I just used google translate so I could keep the French theme. For the first part of the stor...

The first quote I am going to talk about from “The Evolution of My Brother” is on page 150-151 when Jenny is talking about how she feels about getting to go to the camp at Stanford. “All I wanted for so long was to be part of a family that wasn’t mine. To have an excuse to love mine less, an excuse to run away instead of staying so close all the time. .. I was about to experience my first taste of independence.” In this quote, Jenny talks about how she yearns for independence and freedom from her family. Throughout most of the story, Jenny talks about feeling held back by her family. She gets annoyed by her younger brother who she feels she has to parent and her parents don’t seem to watch over them much. I think the sense of going off to college and away from our parents is something many of us high schoolers can relate to Jenny about. My second quote from “The Evolution of My Brother” is towards the end on pages 174-175 where Jenny expresses what seems to be an opposite sentiment com...