Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float Review
- verymuchmeg
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Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float Review
Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs On To Facebook, by Sarah Schmelling Review
Why did this one hit me? You'd have to look at the cover, which is why I posted it above, but here's the text:
Virginia Woolf is afraid of Edward Albee.
Hester Prynne received a piece of flair.
Edgar Allan Poe will not stop looking at you that way.
Ernest Hemingway took the ARE YOU A REAL MAN? quiz.
At last, your favorite characters and authors from classic literature have caved to the pressure and joined a social network. William Shakespeare, with a little help from author Sarah Schmelling, rallies together everyone from Jane Austen to Oedipus Rex to James Joyce to his online booke club group. Of course, mayhem soon ensues:
Mark Twain infiltrates Oscar Wilde's profile page and challenges him to a "quip off."
Jane Eyre listens to "Hard Knock Life" on repeat.
Hamlet becomes a fan of Daggers.
Dracula wonders why this "Edward" and "Bella" are people he may know.
A loving spoof of social networking conventions and a playful game of literary who's who, Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float is sure to have book lovers and Facebook addicts alike twittering with joy.
To be or not to be... on Facebook that is. (Ponders a picture of Shakespeare.)
Lady Macbeth could use a good stain remover.
If you enjoy reading and literature, you can probably see how I was intrigued.
The text itself is structured much like Facebook, with quizzes, news feed/status updates, gifts being given between characters and authors, characters joining and leaving networks, and messages posted on walls. It is the presentation style, and the casual, modern style of the phrasing that makes this book laugh out loud hilarious. Additionally, with the play-by-play coverage of some notoriously confusing classics, it could be of great use to keep readers from getting bogged down in a more dense story, eliminating that whole, "I'm so lost, I should probably give up now," feeling. I can really see this being used to enhance the curriculum in a high school English or Literature class, as it helps ease the connection between classics and their readers.
In my opinion, classic literature has long taken itself too seriously, but Sarah Schmelling has made a noteworthy attempt to change that. If any of these are your favorites, or the bane of your existence, you should check this book out: Hamlet, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno, Paradise Lost, Beowulf, just about everything Shakespeare, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, The Catcher in the Rye, Little Women, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Moby-Dick, Gulliver's Travels, A Farewell to Arms, 1984, Brave New World, Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Flies, Don Quixote, The Metamorphosis, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Lolita, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Of Mice and Men, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, The House of mirth, Cymbeline, Mrs. Dalloway, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Waiting for Godot.