and am paraphrasing the best stuff here.
Okay. So, for those readers who were less than enthralled with Aimee Bender’s unique science fiction, Joseph’s metamorphosis into his grandmother’s card-table chair was easily the most blamable element for a bad aftertaste. Easily. And even for those of us who got happily sucked in (I loved the entire book), this element was still, umm, different. So different it is tricky to explain.
Intuitive is a word that whispered and echoed through my head about a thousand times as I read this book. Anyone else?
Aimee described her choice of a chair by asking us what is more personal than where one sits? And when asked, why not a chair built and carved by his woodworking mother, Aimee proposed that the grandmother’s humble, mechanical chair was far more removed, less intimate, not only because of her physical separation from the family but also because of their mother’s great chasm of emotional distance from her. And let’s not forget that Joseph had worked hard to extricate himself from his mother’s life during all of those “incestuous” Sunday evenings spent removing splinters.