Have you ever felt out of place in your own skin? Dumplin’ is all about a girl named Willowdean Dickson. She works at a fast food restaurant called Harpy’s. Working there, she meets Bo. Bo is a jock from private school. But, Bo soon transfers to Will’s school. When she starts falling for Bo, she is shocked to see him like her back. “Beautiful, he says. Fat, I think. But why can’t it be both at the same time?” Will makes the abrupt decision to enter her town's local beauty pageant, the “Teen Miss Blue Bonnet” pageant. Her mom, the director and former winner of the “Miss Teen Blue Bonnet” pageant, is shocked to find out that Will enters the pageant. The story takes you through Will’s point of view of her journey through the pageant and self confidence. The author urges readers to think beyond stereotypes and focus on what you think of yourself instead of what others think. Will has a best friend, El. I was surprised when they let the pageant come between their friendship. Will and El both entered the pageant for different reasons, raising a disagreement. They had been friends since they were 5 and they let their opinions come between them. The writing of the book had a lot of Southern “slang” which is expected knowing the book is based in Texas. It was fun but also challenging to figure out what all of their explanations meant. It was also fun to read it in my head with a southern accent. I learned many lessons from this book. I learned that my opinion about myself is more important than others. I learned that if I want something to change, then I have to do it myself. I have also learned to never assume you know what someone else is going through. This book has made me have more empathy for others. I have learned that just because someone is different, that doesn’t and shouldn’t define them. It also taught me to be more confident in and about myself. In the words of Willowdean Dickson, “Every body is a bikini body.” by Rachel M.
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“When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans” (Brittain 17). This is our first glimpse into the life and thoughts of the author of Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain. Vera is a determined and ambitious young woman (which was very unusual and considered “improper” at the time) who’s biggest dream is to go to Oxford and become a writer. However, as soon as those dreams are finally within reach, the Great War brings everything in her life into a stark and cold reality. Vera then abandons her studies and ambitions at Oxford in an attempt to do something that makes a difference. It is all in an effort to help her feel closer to those she loves fighting on the fronts: her fiancé , little brother, and best friend. She decides to become a frontline nurse, and with that, the horrors of war are experienced by Vera firsthand. Through the course of the war, she loses all that’s dear to her; first her fiancé, next her best friend, and finally her little brother. In the years following, Vera strives to bring peace and helps in the rising efforts of pacifists. This book is a memoir of Ms. Brittain’s life from 1900 to 1925, with the majority of the book focusing on the war years of 1914-1918. I believe that it was the goal of Ms. Brittain to help people in the coming generations understand and realize what the youth of the time had to go through and sacrifice during, and even after, the Great War. Throughout the book, she explained how the young people of her time had to grow up so quickly, and sadly, many of their talents, dreams, and aspirations were lost. For example, her fiancé had an incredible talent for poetry and writing and her brother had a wonderful talent for music and composing, but tragically those talents were lost when both men died at the young ages of 20 and 22. It made me think of how much every single person, young and old, was in some way affected by the war. I had never really thought before about all of the brilliant young people that were lost to the war. Of course, I had thought of all of the young men who died, but I had never fully considered the potential and talents that they possessed apart from their dutiful war service and loyalties to their countries. Also, the young people that still were left alive from the war might have been so deeply affected by the war that they lost their ambitions and dreams. There was a point in the book where Vera’s fiancé said that if he were to survive the war, he may not go back to Oxford or even become a poet. This was a book full of emotion, as it was a memoir which made it feel very personal. You got to look into the thoughts and feelings of Vera throughout the most turbulent time of her life. You experienced her pain and loss along with her and got a very intimate look of how she coped with the tragedies of war. I chose this book because I have always been very interested in the World Wars and I also have a dream to study at Oxford, but Vera and her time is nothing like I can imagine. At the time, women were not really supposed to go to college let alone have a career; they were basically supposed to marry a suitable man. This is hard for me to imagine because now there are so many opportunities for furthering my education, honestly, the options are limitless. Thus, that is something very different between my and Vera’s situations and lives. I also chose this book because over Thanksgiving Break, I watched the movie that was based on this memoir and it affected me in a way I did not expect. It was the most moved I have been from a movie for a long time, if not ever. That really drove me to want to read her words and experience it on a more personal level. I think that the struggles of the youth of the time really had an impact on me and how I will think of and put into perspective my hardships and trials. I think that this thinking will help me to be a better, more considerate, and understanding person in the future. by Bella B. This book is one that someone with a closed mind could most likely not understand because the point of view is from someone who is not medically mentally sane. Charlotte is the girl who narrates the story; she is sent to a mental hospital because she has a past of harming herself. Charlotte longs for her best friend and her old life. The book is told from what’s going on in her head, so she has some thoughts that seem a little far-fetched. She continues to blame herself for what’s wrong in her life, and Frank. After almost completely losing her best friend, Ellis, to attempted suicide, she does not know how to cope, but she knows she wants to get out of the facility. Her family is not a safe place for her, so she must make a safe place of her own, on her own. She goes to live with Mikey-- in Tucson.
What surprised me was the way Charlie looked at the world after what happened with Ellis. She completely blamed herself for what had happened and felt she had no choice but to end her constant harm to others. She tried things with Mikey and was once again left in sorrow. “That's how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises,” is a quote that basically explains how Charlie sees believing in anyone after what happens with Mikey and Riley. She feels she can get out, but not on her own. I got a little more confused when she started being able to stand up for herself and do things for herself without relying on anyone, even though the extreme heartache she was still feeling. I noticed that the whole road to recovery thing was mostly just people trying to make her be okay. What I got from this is that you need to choose to recover on your own and not let people decide it for you. Through this book, I learned that I should feel more fortunate for what I have in my life. I learned that I can look at things from other people's points of view and understand that they do have things harder and I don’t get offended by it. This book has changed the way I think about people whom self-harm and I understand that they really don’t have a release other than that. I’ve grown from the way Charlie writes about her story and how she really just tells it how it is. I liked that very much about this book because it got confusing, but kept it straight to the point. This is going to help me be better when I one day become a guidance counselor because I will be able to somewhat understand the mindset of someone who feels their only escape is to self-harm. I feel different from this book in that I am a more empathetic person now. I felt like I had empathy before, but reading this book only furthered my understanding of how we really do need to understand that everyone has their own demons. Some are most drastic than others, but in the end, we all can fall to pieces just like Charlie did. by Tiana F. Imagine living in a world where you have no concept as to what’s real and what’s fake. January First is a thought provoking book about a 6 year old girl who is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Micheal, the main character, is the father of Janni, a unique girl who struggles with many aspects of life. Ever since Janni was born, Micheal and his wife Susan noticed something was off. Throughout her life Janni was extremely curious and seemed to pick up on information at an alarming rate. By the age of 4 she had an IQ of 146. As she started to get older she became more antisocial and started creating imaginary friends to keep herself company. Micheal didn’t think anything of this at first, he figured that since she was so smart she just had a hard time interacting with other kids. Once Micheal and Susan had their second child Bodhi, Janni started to act much more violent. Eventually, Micheal and Susan had no choice but to put her in a psychiatric hospital. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. She became consumed by this illness and the prescribed medication wasn’t helping. Micheal and Susan had to try and find their own solutions to her illness. This took a major toll on their family but fortunately they managed to stay together.
This book did a fantastic job of putting me in the main characters shoes. Micheal does a great job describing specific events that he dealt with and it really made me feel as if I was there. I’m not sure how much information was withheld from the book but it surprised me that the author included what seemed to be every little thought he had during his time dealing with Janni and her schizophrenia. I think it may have helped that the book was written from a first person perspective so the reader could understand exactly what was going through Micheal’s head. I also found it interesting how in-depth the book went about schizophrenia as a mental illness. Part of what made the book interesting for me was learning more about Janni’s disease and how it was progressing as she got older. Before I read this book my knowledge of schizophrenia was relatively low. Fortunately, it gave me a first hand look at such a complex mental illness. I never acknowledged exactly how much mental illness can affect a person’s life as well as the others around them. I’ve always taken it for granted how simple and easy it is to live in my shoes. I now understand how difficult mental illness can make a person’s life and in most cases no one has much control over that. January First is an excellent book as well as a tool to better educate yourself on schizophrenia and the other mental illnesses that so many people struggle with today. by Gareth S. “Maybe it’s time to find a new normal.” This book tells the story of Travis Stephenson, the son of Dean Stephenson who played for the Green Bay Packers. Travis’s father pushes Travis to get into football and follow his dad’s footsteps, but instead, Travis enlists in the Marines. The book takes place while Travis is on a 30-day leave from his tour in Afghanistan after his best friend Charlie is killed before his eyes. Travis suffers from Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD) after seeing Charlie be killed and makes his life much more difficult. Shortly after his return from Afghanistan Travis reunites with an old girlfriend, Harper, from middle-school who hates him at the start. After a while, she builds a slow trust for Travis and they enter a relationship. As Travis suffers from his severe case of PTSD Harper helps Travis and keeps him from the suffering and pain that comes with his disease. When I first started reading this book I never noticed the cover and only read it because Ms. BD said it was about the Marines, so when I started reading I was surprised by the romance part of it. I never really knew too much about PTSD and didn’t understand it but after this book, I feel as though I have a better understanding and can grasp the disease a little more than I could previously. One thing I really liked about this book was the flashback format throughout the story. It seemed to give the story some depth and help the reader understand how and why Travis is suffering from PTSD. I can’t say that this book has necessarily changed me and made me learn anything about myself but it mostly made me understand the disease. The author keeps pushing this disease throughout the entire book and makes readers like myself have thoughts of this disease in the back of their heads for a while after reading the book. Ever since I started this book about a month ago this disease has been in my brain and I’ve been thinking about much our soldier’s lives are affected and what they go through. These soldiers appear to us that they are perfect heroes without a care in the world while underneath they are under severe mental pain that they do not deserve. by Carter S. We all would love to believe our criminal justice system is perfect. Sadly, if you take a deeper look there are many flaws. The Sun Does Shine is a book about Anthony Ray Hinton. Hinton is an innocent black man who was put on death row for 30 years. Throughout the book Hinton tells his story. He starts the story when he’s just graduating high school. Hinton talks about his love for baseball and women. As well as his love for his best friend and his mother. He has big dreams, but as a black man, he’s afraid he won’t be able to achieve them. While in his 20s, he doesn’t do great things. He steals a car, but he turns himself in and does his time. When he’s released he spends a couple free years until he’s arrested for allegedly robbing and killing multiple people.
The most challenging part about reading this book is you know when he gets released, but you have to read through him getting disappointed by so many attorneys and judges. You see him getting hopeful, but it all comes crashing down in the next letter he receives. Hinton is a cheerful man, he kept his sanity by making friends and creating his own reality while on death row. Every time a person was being executed, he and the other inmates would bang on their bars and yell as loud as they could to let the person know they weren’t alone. He even made friends with a man who was on death row for lynching a black man, he changed his whole perspective. Everyone knew Hinton was not meant to be on death row. He went through so many lawyers until he got to Bryan Stevenson. Bryan fought for him through it all. He was one of the best things to ever happen to Hinton. Reading this book helped me see further into how complicated and sometimes cruel our justice system is. The reason it was so hard for Hinton to get off of death row was not because the state thought he was truly guilty, but because they refused to admit they made a mistake. This frustrated me to read through how many retrials he had to go through, knowing the State of Alabama knew he was innocent. The lawyers he went through would only work for him if he somehow found a way to get money. His family didn’t have enough money, so they wouldn’t prove his innocence. by When I picked up this book at Barnes & Noble this was intended to be a breezy read. Sure, I knew the author was known for her popular novel “The Hate You Give” which was a rude awakening for young adults who were introduced to the idea of police brutality in a fictional yet personal perspective. This wasn’t a news story on TV but more of a best friends diary situation. I think what Angie Thomas wants us to take away from her literature is the power of being fearless and fighting for your dreams when the world feels against you. I knew Thomas was known for that kind of writing but would she be able to capture that insight in her writing again? I wasn’t disappointed. “On the come up” takes place in a town called Garden Heights where we are introduced to our narrator Brianna. Briana is a teenager trying to make it as a hip hop artist. This isn’t anything new for her family considering her father was considered a Garden Heights hero for his rapping and leadership before his death. Brianna is determined to not only make a name for herself but her community as well breaking colored stereotypes and taking care of her family along the way.
The book itself was far from a breezy read. Just when I think I've confirmed my understanding a read like this comes and washes away everything I thought I knew. The perspective I read from was so far from my own it was impossible to not change for Brianna to thoroughly understand her. The public response to her first real rap surprised me the most. They judged her character more on where she was from than her actual song. It made me reflect on what bias judgement I subconsciously carry with me day to day. Was that middle aged man across the street with a sleeve of tattoos actually following me or was he just looking at the specials board for T-Box right behind me. As for what I noticed, Angie Thomas has a unique way of writing. Every moment feels like we are experiencing things with the character firsthand and both books i’ve read by her share a similar story with a different problem. Colored girl from “the ghetto” dealing with their world feeling like it's against them for the things they can’t control. It’s so far from my own experiences that sometimes I find it hard to believe. I learned a lot from reading not only this book but also her last. You have to be open minded to fully understand someone different from you. The drugs, the struggling for rent, the community, the crime, the day to day problems Brianna dealt with in the book were so foreign to me that I felt bad for her until I realized that she didn’t feel bad for herself. Every set back proved her path more clear to her. The conflict only fueled her drive to become an artist and say what she had to say. It was rejuvenating. People like that give me hope for myself that maybe I will do something so foreign to someone else they might just look up to me for it, This book left me inspired to tune the world out and really embrace who I was and what I believed in strongly enough to take action about it. by Kiah T. Turtles All The Way Down is a story about a 16 year-old girl named Aza. Aza suffers from a severe case of OCD, which is obsessive compulsive disorder. In the beginning of the story, we hear About Aza and her best friend Daisy who decided to look into a fugitive billionaire, Russell Pickett. Aza went to camp with him years before. As they are thinning through the problem of the disappearance, Aza connects with the billionaire's son, Davis, and Aza and Daisy’s friendship is put to the test. Aza is caught up in her own thoughts about the situation and is feeling a
lot of different emotions. Her OCD gets in the way of getting closer to Davis. Some themes that are brought up in this story are mental illness, friendship, love, losing someone, and the idea of caring for yourself as well as others. This book made me think deeply about what true friendship is and how far you will go to do something for another person that you care about. You will go above and beyond just to make sure that person realizes that you care for them. A great quote from this story that spoke to me and made me think differently about friendship and your relationships with other people is this: "You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also you.”- John Green. This quote lets me know that youcan sacrifice your time for those that you really care about while still being able to take care of yourself. As I was reading, another quote caught my attention: “Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the world in the same way that you do. For me, I think that everyone has their own viewpoints about the world, and we are not always going to agree. It’s about communicating with each other and learning our differences to create similarities in the way that we think. On another note, John Green’s writing has an amazing quality that means one minute you could be reading the words on the page, and the next minute you are acting those out in real life and learning the meanings of love, or what it means to just be yourself and know what is best for you and what you want to experience. by Noah S-M Has something ever happened to you that was totally unfair? The book, The Hate U Give, is about a teenage black girl named Staar, who lives in a Black Ghetto, but goes to school at Williamson Prep., a mostly white school. She has to act differently there to fit in, such as changing how she talks, and not using slang like she normally would. One night, while getting a ride from one of her black friends, Khalil, they are pulled over by a cop, and her friend is shot. The author wants you to know that Staar is very angry and sad, and feels ignored by the justice system. The story is narrated by Staar as she tries to get justice for her friend.
Something that surprised me was not that a cop killed someone because they were black, as racism is a thing that I already know happens, but the thing that surprised me was that the cop was not brought to justice. This challenged my thinking because I always thought that the justice system was reliable, fair, and just. I noticed that the book spent a lot of time talking about things related to the trial, but not directly talking about the trial. This gives the effect that the book was not so much about the trial as it was about the riots and other things that happen as people try to find justice for Khalil. However, after thinking about the events of the book, it all centers around the trial. The first thing to happen was Khalil getting shot, the cause of the trial. Then the next major event was the trial. Finally, after hearing the verdict of ‘innocent’ for the cop, riots break out as a result. In this book, I learned that I trust that authority will do the right thing, but they don’t always. This has changed me to become more skeptical in general, and to watch what figures of authority actually do and decide for myself whether it was the right thing to do. This will help me to be better because I will not be trusting everything I hear on the news and what they think the right thing to do was, but I will take the facts into consideration and make my own decision. I am different after reading this book because I feel that I am more independent when forming thoughts and opinions that shape my beliefs. by Nathanial M. Capital punishment is brutal. Dying at the hands of the government is already tough but the lead up to the execution is most times the worst part. There is fear, sorrow, and sometimes feelings of anger. Just Mercy a book about capital punishment and the unfair treatments that black people on death row face. This is a tough topic and Just Mercy is a tough book to read but it has a deeper important meaning that everyone needs to hear.
Just Mercy is about Bryan Stevenson, a black lawyer from Delaware, as he takes on some very difficult court cases that face issues like Racism, Mental Disabilities, and lies in the state of Alabama. The US court system isn’t perfect and for some people it can be actively working against you. This is where Walter McMillian comes in. Walter McMillian is a black man who was accused of killing a young white woman. The evidence to put Walter on death row in the first place is not very stable and most signs point to the evidence even being faked. Bryan Stevenson takes on the case after meeting with Walter and seeing the hope in Walter's eyes. The book shows other court cases but Walter’s story and the creation of the Equal Justice Initiative are Just Mercy’s main story. I had a tough time reading Just Mercy. It’s not a fantasy book or science fiction, everything that happens in Just Mercy is real or a variation on what actually happened. It’s tough sometimes because you know that the government used to turn a blind eye on white people so that they could target black people or people with mental disabilities. It left a bad feeling in my stomach whenever someone would be beaten in prison or worse because these kinds of treatments are inhumane and no one should feel good after reading about this either. Walter McMillian is made a criminal by his government because they needed someone to pin the blame on. Just because Walter was black he was convicted to death row and forced to live in fear. I find this very hard to read about. You learn in history classes about slavery and the terrible ways black people were treated but that was a long time ago. It’s hard to read because this kind of racism is happening today in our current age, not in some long ago time period. The world needs to know. The world needs to see what’s happening so we can fix these problems. Racist governments and cruel prison systems might be a tough topic to talk about but there is a different, deeper meaning written into Just Mercy. Bryan Stevenson created the Equal Justice Initiative to help people with mental disabilities, people of different skin colors other than white, or even children so everyone has a chance at a better life. Many of the so-called criminals that are stuck on death row are young black men because police forces target them and accuse them of crimes they might have never committed. And children under the age of 18 can sometimes get life in jail without parole because they are tried on adult laws that shouldn’t even be able to apply to them. The Equal Justice Initiative is there to help. A silver lining, a glimmer of hope, for someone like Walter McMillian or someone who doesn’t understand what is actually happening to them. People are out there to help. This world might be a rough, racist, and ignorant world but there are people who are trying to help. Just Mercy is about Mercy. About how there is always help. Life in prison shouldn’t be a jury’s first choice of punishment and the Equal Justice Initiative is helping to fix these corrupt systems. by |
AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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