Sign-In
Cart
This Ruler
Paperback
Publisher Price: $15.00
ISBN13: 9780578476315
Publisher: Mark Duff
Published: Aug 8 2019
Pages: 276
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
This Ruler is an allegorical story about veteran teacher Zack Tyndall and a group of immigrant and local students at Elysium Hills High School. The novel is a cutting exposé about the American education system written in a style that blends magical realism with philosophy with just a bit of satire. The story follows student characters Sialia Torres and James Malachite from their first day of high school to their last. The students and teachers navigate a school landscape in which private publishing companies and ambitious school administrators materially benefit from the constant churn of curricula and state-mandated standardized tests. The novel has two basic components: the story of teenagers and their journey through their high school years, and an exposé of the business plan of the publishing companies that make the standardized tests and curricula.
The story is told in a non-linear order that alternates between the honest, humorous antics by the teenagers and dishonest actions by school administrators, an educational consultant, and the publishing companies that make the standardized tests and curricula. The stories are infused with life lessons, master art work, poetry, natural history, and history. A parallel story unfolds as two teenage Aztec Native Americans flee the conquistador Hernán Cortés during the conquest of Mexico some five hundred years ago. The students in the book are on their own personal journeys to overcome challenges of being immigrants and what it means to belong.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Agee, Joel
Musil, Robert
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Paperback