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Gr 9-Up Cordelia Kenn is 19 and happily expecting a baby girl. She writes a series of pillow booksJapanese diaries of total disclosureto her unborn daughter. First, she describes her courtship with Will, her first love. The lengthy second book tells two stories, one on every other page. The remaining books describe her affair with a married man, an intimate friendship with a female teacher, and her reunion with her beloved. Cordelia writes of her life and desires with thrilling abandon and unabashed sexuality, and her first bookwith its breath...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Chambers credits The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, a memoir written in tenth-century Japan, as inspiration, but surely there is also some of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook in this ambitious fictional memoir. Cordelia is assembling a book, "a kind of portrait of myself as a teen-ager," as a gift for her soon-to-be-born daughter. Cordelia is just nineteen, thus capable of rendering her adolescence with detail and immediacy, recapturing for her daughter — and the reader — the experiences of first love and sex, spiritual search and awakening, music, and, most pers...Log In or Sign Up to Read More