Book Meme (Read a Book!)

That Book Meme: Why 23?Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

From Practical Magic, by Alice Hoffman:
There had been a whole pen of scrawny brown-and-white specimens, but by the time the aunts got through with them they never screeched again; in fact, it was their silence that allowed for them to be carried off by stray dogs in the middle of the night.

I'll have to admit it took a couple of books to get a real result-- the two I picked up first were very short, unhelpful sentences. I needed something juicy to think about.

This is a sentence in the midst of describing the Aunts' magic abilities in this wonderful magical feminist book. But out of context like this, it sounds horribly like some sort of rape imagery, or statement on women's vulnerability. Not that women are necessarily supposed to be represented by chickens, but perhaps it's because I just read on Feministe a story about the producer from Girls Gone Wild being accused of date rape. So it seemed to fit with that idea.

That's, of course, part of the power of a meme.