Danielle’s Blog

Alright… I think that they all sound like a bunch of hicks, but at the same time there is somewhat of a large vocabulary in this book. I think they also sound somewhat poor, but at the same time the Father, Atticus, is a lawyer, lawyers usually aren’t poor. Her father is smart though, he’s teaching both of his kids how to read.  Miss Caroline needs to learn to work with children because she made Scout feel bad about “being educated.” Scout sounds like the biggest tomboy I’ve ever heard of, which isn’t a bad thing…she gets things done. Scout kind of reminds me of myself and a lot of my friends, to be honest. I like the part in the book where Scout is rubbing Walter’s nose in the dirt, [page 22] it shows how she honestly doesn’t care how she gets ‘even’ but she does. The fact that she’s messing with him because he got her in trouble shows that she doesn’t just bully anyone, or that she’s not a bully, unless you mess with her. A part that kind of ticked me off was when Calpurnia smacks around Scout for being disgusted at Walter. That was disgusting and the nanny or cook, whatever she is exactly to the family, should not be able to smack around kids. I guess that part, though, shows what time frame the book was written about. Personally I’d say she’s the main character of this story, and the narrorator which you don’t see very often in stories. I like the way Scout tells the story(ies), it’s almost as if she randomly picks out times, but they all fit together in the end.

The movie the Crucible was about lying and deception. It was also about standing (or in this case not standing) up for your beliefs. I have so many words I could use to describe this book.
I guess the first word I could go with is deception. This sums up the whole movie and the ideas and scenes. Everyone was deceiving their neighbors, brothers, sisters, friends and family. They all turned against each other just because of someone else’s words. They all spread rumors and lies. That’s another word I could use to sum up the action of the girls. They were liars that everyone believed. After one girl started lying the rest seemed to follow. It’s a lot like high school to be honest. The only huge difference is that no one is dying from their rumors and lies. The girls are stubborn little brats. If I knew someone like them I probably wouldn’t claim to know them! I don’t think anything like this will happen in my time because technology is greater than words nowadays.

Alright, so we just finished reading “The Ministers Black Veil” by Hawthorne. This was pretty lame, until you really dug deeper and realized that this could be something that every person can relate to. It’s not just some stupid story with a moral that’s common sense. It’s a moral maybe no one really follows. I dont even know if you can call it a moral then..but you know what I mean, hopefully. The moral was that basically if you keep your secrets and pretend to be something you’re not then no one is liking you for you. I live by the rule that I’m honest, and I really don’t care if something I say is going to be hated, because if it’s the truth for me it’s worth being hated for. I think this is something most people should go by! Oh, sure there’s secrets that you don’t want anyone knowing because they’re personal and it’s something you would rather not have the whole world know, but I still think that the more secrets you keep it’s almost as if you’re hiding yourself from the people you love, or could potentially love. So basically Hawthorne’s story is my new best friend, that is after I understood it.

I think essays are fairly easy. The only thing with me though is that I dont think things out before I write them. I basically would rather type whatever comes out of my head. I’m pretty bad at setting them up too, like when we blogged our essays I didn’t mind that much. I’m pretty bad at English, so essays are pretty much my worst thing!! I like the blog you showed us that the guy said he just writes, that’s what i do, he basically wrote my thoughts about essays exactly. I’m really bad at beginning them because I have a hard time gaining interest.

Blog 4: I Chose Whatever I Wanted To!

    There were a few parts in the book that actually were so sad they made me cry. Now, I know I’m a girl, and girls, of course, cry over everything, but usually I don’t cry about much. For me it was really weird to have ink on a page have such an impact to go as far as making me cry. It happened, a few times.

     There was one scene in particular that really hit me hard. Well as you know, Kate has been in the hospital for most of her life, so obviously she has no time for boyfriends, she doesn’t even have a way to meet them right? Well I thought so too, but she meets a boy in the hospital. He has cancer, and he’s balding and sick just as much as she is. So they start talking and he’s really funny, really sweet, everything she has never known before. It goes as far to explain this part where she’s at the hospital and she’s starting chemo again, which I guess makes you nauseous at times. So he bets her she can’t last past a certain point before throwing up, being flirty and all, not in a mean way. Anyways, so she throws up and he sweetly holds her hair back and holds a bucket for her and she apologizes because she’s embarrassed and she’s puking everywhere. He simply says

“Hey, it could be me tomorrow.”

     That’s not the part that made me cry.

     They continue to ‘date’ if you can call it that. There is this dance at the hospital and it’s only for sick kids, so Kate goes out and picks a dress, but she’s very self-conscious because she has scars everywhere from tubes sticking out and all these tests and surgeries. The dance finally arrives and Kate has to wear a mask, but not very many other people do. Kate and Taylor (the boyfriend) aren’t supposed to kiss or anything, not supposed to remove their masks and breathe on each other, basically. It gets to the point where the go in another room and hang out, end up kissing, which means they have to take their masks off.

     Still not the part that makes me cry.

     Kate doesn’t hear from Taylor in a few days and she starts to worry. Her mom, Sara finds out a few days after the dance that Taylor has died. He died from germs that Kate basically spread when they took off their masks.

The good ones always die.

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister’s Keeper. New York:Atria Books, 2004

Blog 3: I Chose Setting.

Sara’s Thoughts:

Jesse, who has been patiently playing with a GI Joe that has no head, perks up at this news. “You know how they draw blood, Kate?”
“Crayons?”
“With needles. Great big long ones that they stick in like a shot—“
“Jesse,” I warn.
“Shot?” Kate shrieks. “Ouch?”

     Obviously this family lives half of their lives in a hospital.

     The book wouldn’t be the same if they were at their home with their white picket fence. If this book was all about a girl having cancer, but it didn’t have the family in and out of the hospital it would probably take away most of the dramatic scenes!

     The quote

“We know all the nurses by their names, and their kids.”

     basically states how much they are in the hospital. The family knows the nurses but first and last names, they know their kids, not from going to school with them, but from meeting them at the hospital! Sure, there are times when they are at their house and everyone is happy, but it seems like the hospital is where they feel more ‘at home.’ The hospital is where Kate meets all of her friends, when she actually meets any. It’s where she has her first kiss, where she meets her first ‘real’ boyfriend… it’s basically the place she grows up.

     If this book didn’t have the hospital it would be like football players without their football field, or soccer players without their soccer field! A girl with leukemia needs her hospital visits. Anna and Kate had half of their memories implanted in their heads while they were in hospital rooms.

     If we take a look at their home compared to the hospital you won’t see much of a difference. A few times the book talked about happy times at home when Kate wasn’t sick, and the family would play board games, or it talked about the first few years of Kate’s life, the years before they knew she was sick. It said she was a happy baby who always did what she was told. Their house was an ordinary one, with a garden (who knew they would have time for a garden when they had to constantly watch over their little girl?) and green grass. One that if you looked at it on the outside, you wouldn’t know on the inside there was a girl dying, and there was a boy starting fires when his dad was a firefighter, that there was a mom who was dying internally and emotionally, or the little sister who was just a guinea pig for her older sister, who gave half her life for her sister to live. 

Who knew? 

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister’s Keeper. New York:Atria Books, 2004

okay i have to write this darn blog
i am so freakin’ mad!!!
okay so the way i found my book (My Sister’s Keeper) was online at this teenager review website, right? right. So all the books on there were not in our library but this one, so It sounded good and i read through it, it made me cry.
the reason i cried was because i thought it was a true story, turns out it’s not.
i was reading up online to see if there was a movie and there was this reading list and it had it under fiction. So i looked inside my book and outside and sure enough, it was fiction.

LAME.

Blog 2: I Chose Plot

The end?

    
     To predict the ending of this book I went through thousands of thoughts in my head. This book would be one of the hardest-if not the hardest book to predict what will happen next. I’m taking the challenge. Since this book was over 400 pages long I took my swings at guessing what will happen each 50 or so pages. Half of the time I was dead on, the other half something happened that I didn’t even think would be included anywhere in this book! Every minute, every page turn, and every character change the book has some new twist, whether Kate gets put back into the hospital or Anna has another ‘breakdown.’ What makes it even harder is that Kate has a lot of medical things wrong with her that I don’t know the symptoms of, so therefore it makes it harder to predict what’s going to happen to her next. I’m going to try.    

     ”My mother brought the turkey’s wishbone out to the table, and we fought over who would be granted the right to snap it. Kate and I were given the honor. Before I got a good grip, my mother leaned close and whispered into my ear, “You know what to wish for.” So I shut my eyes tight and thought hard for remission for Kate, even though I had been planning to ask for a personal CD player, and got a nasty satisfaction out of the fact that I did not win the tug-of-war.”
[[page 136-137]] 

     I think sometime in the next 100 pages, (I’m saving the last 100 pages for my next blog entries so I’m surprised) the father (Brian, a firefighter) will find out that his son (Jesse, the rebel) is doing all these fires that are around the city. The fires where Brian cannot even begin to catch the culprit because they are so good at destroying whatever they can, with fire. Eventually I believe that it will lead to Sara (the whole-hearted, but half involved mother) having an emotional and physical breakdown. She obviously needs it, however.

      The book, just like any other book, will have it’s heartbreaking, but happy ending. I think Kate is going to die in result of Anna not giving up her kidneys, but I think it will be a good thing (somehow in the book) for everyone, Kate is out of pain. If nothing else happens I definitely think Kate is going to die from her leukemia. Now being that this is a true story I feel like I’m playing with puppets, or reading a book to a little kid. I don’t know what is going to happen, I have my ideas, but I feel like I’m actually toiling with peoples lives! Like something I say will happen and I’ll feel bad that it does, even though I know it’s a book and it was written for people to read about this family’s experiences.

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister’s Keeper. New York:Atria Books, 2004

Blog 1: I Chose Character.

Anna

     Anna is the most confusing character I have ever read a book about. Gosh, this girl is giving me issues that I can’t deal with until I turn the next page. Being a thirteen year old girl she is someone I can somewhat relate to, not completely, however. As I read the first couple of pages I really got interested in the book, mainly because of Anna. She’s the most interesting 13 year old you could write a book about!

“I was born for a specific purpose. I wasn’t the result of a cheap bottle of wine or a full moon or the heat of the moment. I was born because a scientist managed to hook up my mother’s eggs and my father’s sperm to create a specific combination of precious genetic material.” [[pages 8-9]]

     These, to me were the first lines that really caught my eye. Quoting her words is the only way I can put into words how I really feel about Anna in this book. She’s indescribable. Being that it is a true story really sets me off– it’s amazing how a girl going through this much is not a big ball of ‘mess.’

     Everyone has their ‘cancers.’ Their diseases that plague them, their bad days, years, bad boyfriends, girlfriends, bad experiences– the things that make them wish it was a new day, maybe years from now or maybe years ago. Reading this book really intrigued me, I know I have my bad days, days where I can’t find that stupid school ID, even if it’s right in front of my face, where I wish I could sleep just a little longer, even though I know I have a Spanish test that I can only pass if I take it. I have my ‘cancers.’ No– I’m not dying, I’m not puking up blood, I’m not constantly in and out of the hospital. Anna’s sister is dying from multiple things. Her number one killer is her leukemia, which is known to not kill a person alone, but with help.

     She lives in her white picket fence home, which from the outside you wouldn’t know there was a girl on the inside dying. Anna is a complicated girl, she may not be the one dying, but on the inside she’s already dead. She’s been in and out of hospitals her whole life, not for her, but as I mentioned earlier, her sister. She was basically born (or should I say created?) to save her sisters life, now and forever. She is basically suing her parents for rights to her own body, which really confuses me! She wants to have her own body so she doesn’t have to donate anymore, but if she stops donating her sister will die. How can she be such a caring girl and yet let her sister, her best friend, her only friend, die?
This book bounces back and fourth between characters telling the story. First Anna, then Campbell, to Sara, continues with Brian, and a repeating cycle that begins with Anna again. She keeps me interested, I’m always waiting for her turn to come around so I can see what problem she is going to have next, how she will solve it, and what confusing emotions she’s blabbing about.

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister’s Keeper. New York:Atria Books, 2004

So I was gone when we had our group discussions but I borrowed someone’s and listened to what they had to say about Of Mice and Men.
Group Discussion Bits and Pieces
i really liked these bits and pieces one for a few reasons –first of all it was some of the only pieces you could hear or where cody wasn’t yelling into the microphone..and it was because these parts were most important in the book, if you cut them out of the book you would have no story line.
Group Discussion bits and pieces 2
I picked these bits and pieces because the ending is really important when it talks about curleys wife..(if you can’t hear him) he says that she basically wasn’t the biggest part of the book and she caused alot of trouble.