Don't let the bad Things Grow: Book Response and Analysis of "Shine"

          Shine, by Lauren Myracle, tells the story of a 16 year old girl named Catherine, or Cat for short, and her quest to find the person who beat up her ex friend and left him for dead. Patrick, her ex best friend, was found tied to a gas station pump, with the nozzle shoved down his throat, still spewing gas. After a horrible attack on Cat left her alone, confused and depressed, she shut herself out from the world, and most importantly, she shut herself out from her best friend, Patrick. Throughout the story, Cat learns more about the peoples lives around her, and how just like her, they held in their bad thoughts and experiences, and shut the outside world out. The message Lauren Myracle is trying to convey in this novel is that letting horriffic thoughts and events fester or grow inside your mind will only make your life worse. Coming out or confiding in someone about the bad things is the best way to keep your sanity.
        Robert. Gwennie. Beef. Cat. These characters in the story have all held in their horrible events. The result for all four of these children is either death, or pain to themselves. Gwennie spent her entire life being bullied about her weight, and physically abused about it at home by her father. After years of holding in all the feelings and hatred she had, she finally cracked, and took it out on herself. Her decision: to abuse laxitives, starve herself, make herself vomit after eating, and cut herself when she thought about cake. Robert has had a rough life as well. While still in the womb, Robert's mom had a severe alcohol and heroine addiction, which resulted in Roberts physical and mental deformities. At only 11 years old, Robert has had to deal with years of family neglect. Because he hasnt told anyone, he often seeks the comfort of friendship in the teenage crack stompers who live down the street from him. The end result: an eleven year old boy who now has a cocaine addiction. Beef has has to live his entire life in the closet because his town is homophobic. When the pain became unbearable, he turned to meth. Meth can make a person feel like they can do anything, and Beef's idenity limited what he felt like he could do in life. He ended up on a meth rage, beating up Patrick, and then a month later, another meth rage, and he fell off suicide rock to his death. The main character in this mystery novel, Cat, was molested during the summer of her eighth grade year. After, she shut the world out. She shut out her friend Patrick when he needed her the most. When she heard about Patricks attack, she finally decided she had to come out of her dark hole and tell the world what happened to her to better help Patricks court case. After, she felt alot better about herself, and even found closure in the whole incident.
          In conclusion, you never want to bottle up your feelings or traumatizing situations. The best way to keep your sanity, or to find closure in a horrific event is to talk about it with a trusted, accepting friend. If you don't, then the end results could be an undesired rage of sorts, or in these cases, even deadly

Hope is What Get's You Over the Mountain of Misery: A Book Response to "The Hunger Games"

Have you ever been stuck in a situation, one you weren’t very fond of, and clearly thought to yourself “why am I doing this? How did I end up in this situation? It would be better if I just gave up and quit, if I just ignored it”, and the next thing you know, you’ve completed the task to the best of your ability, or maybe you’re somewhere in the middle, but you think to yourself, “I can’t just give up now. If I don’t do this, I’ll deeply regret it later”? Maybe it’s a school project, a paper for work, or maybe you’re fighting to the death in the seventy-fourth Hunger Games. In the best-selling novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Katniss Everdeen, a 16 year old girl from the poorest part of her District volunteers for her sister at the reaping of the 74^th annual Hunger Games. The Hunger Games, a nationally televised reality TV show, consists of 24 children between the ages of 12 to 18 fighting each other for the chance to go back home to their un-wealthy District, and shower their family in money and gifts. The minute the Hunger Games start, Katniss desperately wants to give up. She just wants it to end. She doesn’t want her death to be slow and painful. The only problem is, she has a mother, her best friend and his entire family, and most importantly, her sister Prim to feed. She knows if she doesn’t make it home, her family will have to watch her die on live television, and starve. She hopes that her loved ones will get enough to eat for the rest of their lives, and that’s what keeps her going throughout the Games. Hope. Hope is what gets you through the hard times, when you feel like you can’t do it anymore.  By having hope, you have a small thread to grasp on to while you make your way across the mountain of misery. Your hope is your goal, the only thing that keeps you from quitting.

            One of Katniss’s  hopes’ is to return to her family and loved ones so she can keep feeding them. Katniss’s talents with a bow are what feed her family every night, and also what keeps her alive during the Games. Her little sister, Prim, is Katniss’s  favorite, most loved person in her life. That’s why when Prim’s name is drawn for the Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers for her because she knows Prim, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, wouldn’t survive the brutal competition. She was acting on her hopes. Her hope was that Prim would be safe.

            One thing I feel that readers learn from this book is that when you have hope, you can get through the tough times. When Katniss had hope that her family would survive, she powered through the Hunger Games, and survived them. Hope is what get’s you through the times when you feel like giving up. 

The Ideal Situation May Not be so Ideal: Response to The Novel "Out of my Mind" by Sharon M. Draper

          Living a life that's dictated by a disability isn't the ideal situation. Life for disabled people is full of struggles that the majority of healthy, unaffected people don't have to face. These struggles may include bullying, immobility, feeling alone, feeling different, feeling as if you're a burden, being constantly categorized in a certain group because of physical and mental impressions, being heavily dependent upon others, or worse, never being able to do anything for yourself, and probably worst of all, not being able to say anything that you desperately want to say. Melody Brooks, a ten-year old girl in the fifth grade has experienced every one of these struggles. Not being able to speak, and barely being able to move controls her entire life. She can't do anything by herself, and getting her point across to anyone takes a tremendous amount of effort. Although she has to deal with these obstacles, she always manages to make the best of her life. Unlike most of us, she doesn't take for granted the true gift of friendship, and whenever she makes a new friend, it feels like Christmas day. She doesn't have many friends, because people only take time so see her on the outside. She has realized over a course of time that the only important physical aspect of a person is their smile. Melody takes the time to get to know the inside of a person’s personality, even if they don't lift a finger to figure out her personality. She never takes for granted the importance of independence, and does what she can for herself and or others whenever she gets the opportunity. She never underestimates the power of knowledge, because although she can't do much, one thing she can do is learn. Whenever she learns about something, whether it be about monkeys, architecture, Latin roots, or even cooking techniques, it's one of the only things that can make her non-different, and more human. Everyone learns. She has that in common with everyone, so she learns as much as she can. She never lets her disability take control. No matter how hard the challenge may seem, she always finds a way to conquer it. Disabilities aren't barriers that prevent you from conquering what you want to conquer, they are just simply small mountains that you have to take time to figure out, plan your routes, and climb to the top.

          This novel shows readers that even with a severe disability, you can achieve things beyond your wildest dreams! Melody, having spent most of her life learning from the Internet, books, and television, is exceptionally smart beyond elementary, and even middle school levels. One thing she has definitely wanted to do is be on the quiz team at her school. The school then competes on television for another chance to be on television in Washington D.C. Thanks to a new program her school has added, she is able to spend half of her day with the General Education children, and the other half in her under-level SPED classes. This gives her the chance to take the team's admission test in her new Social Studies class! She ends up getting a perfect score on both the exams, and makes the team! She is extremely exited and also nervous about being on the team, but once everyone sees how smart she actually is, most of them learn to accept her, and even become friends with her. 

         Being handicapped affects more than just people’s physical needs. This is shown throughout the story. Being handicapped may seem like a horrible thing to people who are healthy, but in reality, being normal is more horrific. When you never have to worry about how people perceive the overall way you look (we still worry about how other people think we look, but not in a way that handicapped people have to worry about it), it makes a person less sensitive to other peoples feelings. Commenting on a person’s appearance, staring at them, even whispering about them. They see it all. When you never have to worry about being completely ignored by your peers because you make them feel "uncomfortable", you become less aware how you make people feel by not even willing to talk to them. When you never have to worry about making friends, you rarely consider the fact that most children with special needs have zero friends, and that it feels horrible knowing that no one in their school wants the slightest bit to do with them. Melody see's how mean and insensitive the normal children act to each other, and she knows they wouldn't consider the small comments "mean", because not having any physical or mental issues prohibits them from perceiving humanity through a different set of lens. Having a handicap affects more than a person’s physical or mental needs. It forces them to see the true "normal" population, and how cruel they can be without even knowing it. Because the disabled population has to deal with the cruelness of being ignored, being laughed at or mocked, being talked about without them knowing it, and no one taking the time to see their personalities or what they have to say more than any other categorized group, it shows them how being healthy might actually be worse than having a handicap. They too would become part of the insensitive, judgmental majority. 

          I hope that children, teens, and adults alike read this book, and see the true kindness, intelligence, and integrity in every single person, handicapped or not, without first-impression appearances being an aspect in judgment of a personality. I hope they learn that disabled people go through many hardships, and that just a complement or nice comment can make their entire week. I hope they learn that although these hardships sound incredibly challenging, the people who carry these challenges around with them every second of the day never let it act as a barrier to their goals. I hope they learn that the only physical aspect that they should consider for personality-judgment is a persons' smile. 

About Myself🍀

Hi!

My name is Hayden🍀! This is my very first blog post, so I decided I should tell you a little about myself, and what this blog will be about. For starters, this is my "📚Book Blog📖", and I will be mostly talking about books I have read or am currently reading! I really love to read. I don't know exactly what it is about reading I love so much, but I'm hopeful that by the conclusion of this blog, I'll have discovered more about reading books and what I love about them. My favorite books include Looking For Alaska by  John Green, The Wizard Of Oz Series by L. Frank Baum (I've read every book in the Wizard Of Oz series), The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins, and many more that I could list but then my post would be too long!                                               My favorite genre of books include young adult fiction, science fiction, and realistic fiction. My least favorite genre of books include non-fiction, and mystery. I actually really like mystery, but I haven't found many that I have really liked that much yet. I have found a couple really good ones though, like Gone Girl by Gilligan Flynn, which is my all-time favorite mystery book! If I could find more mystery that I like, it wouldn't be one of my least favorites. Hopefully some of you guys could reccomend some to me? I'm in desperate need of a mystery book so I don't lose all hope in that genre😂.  Anyways, I hope that you find my book blog interesting after I've posted some more, because this is just an introduction. Have a great day, and I'm going to tell you something I found on a statistics website-if the average human reads 35 to 45 pages a day, that person will have a 41% better chance of getting a degree higher than a high school degree! 

Have a wonderful day and remember to read at least 35 to 45 pages a day📚📖🍀!!!

Sincerely, Hayden🍀