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  • Writer's pictureSana & Tanisha

CORNFLAKES BY CHRISTIANE TANN


Cornflakes is a realistic fiction set in what was called the Jazz Age, or the Roaring Twenties (1920s) by Christiane Tann. It vividly describes the life of two lead characters, Lucky and Nina, through the first person's perspective and their individual lives intertwine together through their eyes. The way the authoress traversed through their discrete catastrophic and horrendous lives is commendable. The novel captures historical significances: the economic boom of postwar America, the vogue of motor racing, and the free-flowing illegal liquor, drugs and tranquilizer. Even the spike of racial anxieties of the period and the LGBT culture are evident in the novel. This book is the plentitude of brilliantly scrutinized historical details that make this world come to live. Ms. Tann skillfully mixes fiction with historical facts and gives us a look in one of the most exciting decades of the last century. The book has such strong descriptive quality that when the characters walk into a room, youโ€™re transported there with them. Each character the authoress wrote was beautifully embellished, and even if you didnโ€™t know their backstory, you knew they had one. I'm not a history connoisseur, but reading this story made me want to look up on some facts of this period, about Indianapolisโ€”Indy 500, the growing motor-racing scene, homosexuality as a crime during the period and the Friendship and Freedom Organisation. The fixation of the author with this era is pleasantly unpretentious, modest and simple to see and I have to say, now I am captivated too. There are stark differences in the way people lived a century ago, of course, but thereโ€™s enough overlap with our own modern experience to make this novel about that decade resonate powerfully with todayโ€™s world. This is one reason why I liked the book so much, another being the extraordinary explosion of experimentation and boundary-pushing that Ms. Tann engaged in, a sense of limitless potential that goes hand-in-hand with the manic energy associated with the decade. This is the paragon of and about the 20s. Language, fashion, characters, lifestyle and technology, everything feels real and breaths the air of the 1920's.

Rating : 5 /5 โญ๏ธ โ€”Sana.

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