Don Quixote meets Annie Oakley meets Huck Finn


The bell from women for durable women characters is answered in a volume entitled The Travels of Annie T. Hastings. The leading character, Annie, is haunted by her past, to be sure. On the contrary that haunting has produced a unique, strong, and still eccentric older woman. As an older woman who has struggled with an fact in her foregone when her daughter was taken from her, Annie resolves to good buy the girl, any more a grown woman. Annie, on a shoe-string budget, crosses the nation to grasp her goal. Nevertheless along the way, she faces legion challenges. And with everyone remonstrance conquered, Annie gains impact and click which prepares her for audience her daughter.

One decisive subject which pervades the textbook is the business of perception. Annie locks horns with Sister Rose, tendency nun of the shelter where Annie stays. On the other hand the reader slowly senses that Annieв s objective of opening of Sister Rose is askew. Annie demonizes Rose who matchless tries to help. However Annieв s pride and dander at the church blinds Annie to Roseв s fair intentions. The reader must peruse between the lines. The reader must apprentice that Annie is telling her anecdote from her subjective speck of view. Annie is not deliberately an unreliable narrator, but unreliable she is. And Annie is not introspective sufficiently to accept this.

The thesis of insight is clearly seen when Annie arrives in Chicago and demands her antiques from her nieces. Certainly the nieces are trailer-park trash, but Annie has exaggerated the assessment of the maple table and the lingerie chest. She doesnв t exaggerate as subterfuge over she in truth believes in the profit of the furniture, though clearly they compass inappreciable value. The paintings of the clowns highlights the topic whether one had missed it. Her expectancy that the wide-eyed clowns may someday be as helpful as a portrayal by Renoir is evidence enough to gaze that she is a modern, female history of Don Quixote.

But things of perception obtain a hurried reading, and the reader must be prepared to read, even, between the lines. One diverse levels this book, The Travels of Annie T. Hastings, is a literary interrogation into the universe of how, we as individuals, announce stories, divulge our doctrine of truth, from a community perception. We all gain a bit of Don Quixote in us.

anniehastings.com

Patrick Egan