title: This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
author:  Aidan Chambers 
description: Grade 9 UpCordelia 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 breathless pace, come-hither conversation, and chase and catchis a whirling, delicious sex bomb. The form of the second book is jarring and infuriating if read in sequence, yet it's too disheartening, in a book of this size, to read one story and turn back 200 pages for the other. The real challenge for teens, though, is pages and pages of Cordelia's bad poetry and precious, banal, and often crushingly boring musings. Chambers's male characters are perfectly realized, and he hits bright, insecure Will right on the familiar, frustrating male teenage head. Unfortunately, Cordelia reeks of male fantasy, and Chambers's strings are evident as she and a friend write on each other and roll around naked; as she purports to <i>love</i> menstruation; as she expounds upon breasts ad nauseum. By the last third of the novel, even the formerly crisp dialogue often sounds like philosophical discourse. Cordelia's excruciating musings continue to intrude upon her last three books, and the electric promise of the first section is never fulfilled.<i>Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # The Betrothal
  
  
  ### The Seven Kingdoms
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Cordelia Castel
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  # Copyright © 2018 by Cordelia Castel
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2018 by Cordelia Castel. All rights reserved. This book or any
  portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without
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