Don Quixote meets Annie Oakley meets Huck Finn


The bell from women for capable women characters is answered in a album entitled The Travels of Annie T. Hastings. The leading character, Annie, is haunted by her past, to be sure. Nevertheless that haunting has produced a unique, strong, and yet eccentric older woman. As an older woman who has struggled with an act in her ended when her daughter was taken from her, Annie resolves to jewel the girl, immediately a grown woman. Annie, on a shoe-string budget, crosses the territory to stretch her goal. However along the way, she faces manifold challenges. And with everyone test conquered, Annie gains compel and perception which prepares her for concourse her daughter.

One determining topic which pervades the publication is the business of perception. Annie locks horns with Sister Rose, mind nun of the shelter where Annie stays. On the other hand the reader slowly senses that Annieв s location of prospect of Sister Rose is askew. Annie demonizes Rose who sole tries to help. On the contrary Annieв s pride and cat fit at the church blinds Annie to Roseв s indubitable intentions. The reader must glance at between the lines. The reader must gain that Annie is telling her clothesline from her subjective site of view. Annie is not deliberately an unreliable narrator, but unreliable she is. And Annie is not introspective sufficiently to cognize this.

The keynote 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 equivalent of the maple table and the lingerie chest. She doesnв t exaggerate as subterfuge since she absolutely believes in the amount of the furniture, though clearly they posses brief value. The paintings of the clowns highlights the subject whether one had missed it. Her aspiration that the wide-eyed clowns may someday be as meaningful as a portray by Renoir is evidence enough to descry that she is a modern, female history of Don Quixote.

But things of perception capture a rapid reading, and the reader must be prepared to read, even, between the lines. One multifold levels this book, The Travels of Annie T. Hastings, is a literary question into the complexion of how, we as individuals, apprise stories, blow open our meaning of truth, from a resident perception. We all obtain a bit of Don Quixote in us.

anniehastings.com

Patrick Egan