Blog about Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Blog about Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
My initial reaction to reading this book is that I honestly was not going to enjoy it that much. Reading the back cover it seemed like it was kind of a chick’s book that was about a girls problems with her mother, nothing that really interested me. My opinion changed when I started reading it though. It was a really complicated situation that Clarissa had been put in that really messed up her life. Having to deal with the disappearance of her mother at such a young age with so many questions so little answers had to be very tough. To add to the toughness having a mentally handicapped brother that needed so much special care made her life very difficult. Over the years she did try and investigate where she had gone but she had no luck. Then when her father died she found out that he was not her real dad and that is when she really went to find out the truth about her mother and biological father. The things that she figured out when she visited Lapland were totally unexpected and that is one of the reasons this book is so interesting and definitely leaves you wanting to read more. The strange thing is though that at the end of the book the similarities between Clarissa and her mother’s actions are very similar. Clarissa found out that she was the child of a rape. Her mother was raped while protesting a dame while she was married to another man. After she was born her mother had to leave him because he could not have him raising a child that she was so ashamed of. Clarissa was also raped as a teenager while visiting a camp so she can relate to how her mother felt and how devastating such a thing is. Later Clarissa actually tracks down her mother who is living in a hut taking care of dogs. When she finally finds her and asks her why she did the things she did she says because she was not happy and she knew that that life she had been living was not the life for her. She really did not feel bad at all for leaving her children or husband, she did what she had to do. This surprised me because it seems like an awful thing to just vanish like she had done. Finding her mother though changed Clarissa perspective of her own life and in the end of the book she did something very similar to what her mother had done by leaving her fiancé and just traveling away from it all. This also surprised me because I did not think that after all the pain she had gone through she would do the same thing to someone else. This book was very interesting and unique and I really did enjoy reading it because it had a lot of twists and turns that made it a good read.

Blog about my Narrative Sequence Paper
For my narrative Sequence paper I would like to do option one. I am not surer of the exact pages I would like to pick yet but I want it to be in the vicinity of the ending of the book. I might do when she finally finds her mother and when they confront each other. There is a lot of deep things that some of the stuff her mother said might have meant like when she says that she didn’t have anything to say to her and she didn’t feel any obligation. You want to look deep into those words and think of all of the reasons why she said that and meant that. There might still be some gaps but most of them have been filled in. She also traces a flower in the mirror while saying that. You wonder what this flower represents and why she would do that at such a weird time. She also says if she wanted to talk to them she would have written a letter which kind of hints at she wanted to write a letter many times but she just never did. She also says that no decisions were made for her which probably means that she did not choose to have Clarissa as a child and there was nothing she could do about it though. Then she just drops it and never mentions it again. There is another part later when she tells her mother that her father had died, and at the time it didn’t seem to faze her but she was awoken in the middle of the night and Clarissa tries to confront her but all she can say to her is she has no idea what she has been through then she wants to talk but she just gets angry at Clarissa. You wonder why didn’t she want to share some of her feelings with her. Why didn’t she want any part in her daughter’s life. The last section that I might use in my paper is the very last part of the book when Clarissa is contemplating staying her or going back to her fiancé Pankaj. She thought that if she returned to Pankaj that he would not leave her just because duty demanded him to stay there because she was wounded and she could not do that. It makes you wonder why she was with Pankaj for all these years if all of a sudden she could just leave him like that. It also makes you wonder how she could do that to him when her mother did it to her. I think that I have some good ideas of which pages to close read into and could make a paper out of any of my choices.