I know, I know. I’ve already blogged about an Aimee Bender book. Zita has blogged about her, John P. has blogged about her. Well, that’s because she’s great. I recently read her first novel An Invisible Sign of My Own in two afternoons. This novel is about Mona Gray, a young OCD math teacher who struggles with making a commitment to anything (or anyone) ever since her father came down with a mysterious illness. As he quits doing the things that he loves, so does Mona.
She’s forced to face her fears after becoming an elementary school math teacher. For one, a student who latches onto Mona divulges that her own mother is sick with cancer, and for two, Mona begins to fall in love with the young, eccentric science teacher.
My favorite passage in the whole book is the one in which Mona first begins to realize how she feels about the science teacher. She finds him outside, hiding from parents on Back-to-School-Night, and blowing cigarette smoke-filled bubbles.
I tensed my wrist, and taking the cigarette up to my lips with my other hand, sucked in. The smoke waited, patient, in my mouth, and I raised the swirling bubble with my arm, and released the smoke in a stream into a hold of the wand. It whooshed out of me: white, intimate.
I got ready to seal up the bubble and he was watching. I could feel him waiting, and I felt the bubble wobbling, and smelled the bucket and breathed in the smoke and I knew right then that mine would work. Mine would seal up, take off, and rise over our heads. A beautiful shuddering pearl in a sphere.
I felt him waiting for me, and I wrecked it. (pg. 109-110)
-Kaycie
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