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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
title: Chasing Windmills
author: Catherine Ryan Hyde
genre: fiction/YA
published: 2008
pages: 262
first line: This is the part that's going to be hard to explain: How can I tell you why two people who were afraid of everything-other people, open spaces, noise, confusion, life itself-wound up riding the subways alone under Manhattan late at night?
I'm hoping you can join us in a Book Chat today! We'll be discussing Catherine Ryan Hyde's Chasing Windmills.
I read & reviewed Chasing Windmills and enjoyed this book very much. Author Catherine Ryan Hyde's writing is moving and emotional.
She is also the author of Pay It Foward.
I loved this story. I lived inside this book for a couple of days. You know how sometimes you can get really into a book and the storyline and characters just grab you? This is what happened while I read this story. I really wanted Sebastian and Maria to have a happy ending. The plot was really good and I found myself not wanting to put this book down.
Chasing Windmills is the story of Seventeen year old Sebastian who lives with his father in NYC. His nuerotic father homeschools Sebastian and basically smothers him, not allowing Sebastian contact with his family or friends. His father puts fear into him about anything having to do with the outside world.
One night Sebastian takes a ride on the subway and notices a woman getting on the train. Maria is a twenty-two year old mother of two young children. She has been with the father of her children, a man named Carl, since she was fifteen. Carl, hits Maria and she is very unhappy with her married life.
Maria and Sebastian start to show up at the subway each night after midnight just to see each other. And after a few days, they finally speak to each other.
Soon enough they fall in love.
'First I found out that there was only one face in the whole world, as far as I was concerned, and it was hers. Exactly hers. Nobody else's. It matched the one I had been trying so hard to remember, to see in my head, for so long. And it wasn't just her features, either. It was her smile. The way she cut her eyes away. The way she moved.
It was like a key that fit into a lock when no other key would.'
Maria loves the movie 'West Side Story' and her nickname for Sebastian becomes Tony after one of the main characters. Maria & Sebastian do remind me of West Side Story. They have a forbidden romance, they have to keep it a secret.
I'm a sucker for a good love story. And there's a great one in Chasing Windmills. Being a YA novel, it stays clean and rated PG, and it's a touching love story.
Sebastian loves Maria plain and simply, there's an innocence involved. The both of them are very shy, they take it really slowly. It even takes them a few nights of riding on the subway before speaking to each other.
Do you enjoy romances in YA novels? OR do you think they are a bit too tame?
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This is part of j.kaye's noontime book chats.
click here for day 1 of this book chat
