In comparison to Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story seems really raw. This is probably because of the lack of beautiful music and dancing, the rawness of the language which was not in the movie of the same name (though it may have appeared on stage), and the update putting it in the middle of a gang war... That, and the language, is much more immediate to us than the family feud of the original. There are also some skips in the action which are disconcerting, caused by bad editing. The child will need some preparation...though maybe not as much as I think. We will see. Overall the books we are reading this year will make for a really depressing summer--maybe not quite as depressing as if we were reading 1984, but still...
I have now started People of the Nightland by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear. It is #14 and that, I am fairly sure, is the number of these books that I have read. All it takes to get me interested in these books is to look at the timeline and map (this is set 10,000 years ago in the Great Lakes region.) Then the Forward gives a fascinating account of what was happening climatically at the time--rapid global warming after a very rapid ice age--rapid enough to cause huge changes over ten years, let alone people's lifetimes. The Prologue shows present archaeologists in a dig in which they are finding human bones of the period scattered helter skelter across a large area and obviously broken perimortum coming to the conclusion that they were killed by a huge and sudden flood! Wow!
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