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Value and nature of childrens literature
Value and nature of childrens literature
Reflection on children's literature
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Do you feel trapped in your current situation? Are you looking for someone to relate to? Runaway was written by Wendelin Van Draanen. The genre of this book would be realistic fiction. Runaway is a book that follows a 12 year old girl named Holly, as she runs away from home. Holly lives in foster care and is looking for a way to escape. Personally I would recommend this book to my peers and friends. Hollys character is hard to relate to, but easy to empathize to. The setting of Runaway is all over the place. Holly wants to end up at the pacific ocean, and does everything she can to end up there. Holly’s father passed away in a car accident, and her mom passed away by overdosing on heroin. Which ultimately landed Holly in foster care. Holly’s foster care parents aren’t any better. They lock her in the laundry room, with no explanation. …show more content…
Holly is given a journal in class one day, and when she is bored in the laundry room, she starts to write. When the abuse becomes too much to handle, she runs away, and succeeds. Holly has to learn to live off of nothing. She begins stealing food and necessities and does everything she can to stay away from social services. The brutality of this book makes it hard to read, but also intriguing. I couldn’t put it down. Runaway is a very interesting book to read because it is told in the form of journal entries. Holly writes daily in her journal, describing the events that have happened to her. Being only 12, she isn’t allowed in homeless shelters by herself, so she meets a woman who agrees to be her street mom. Holly stays in shelters as much as she can, but most of the time it’s just her and the streets. There are sometimes over the course of the book, where Holly would not journal for days or even weeks at a time. This makes you want to keep reading to find out what has happened to
I found this book really interesting, especially how Jaycee is telling us her story for the many others who have been held against their will out there so they know they are not alone. She also has her own organisation called the J A Y C foundation. One thing I think that connects me to this book is the relationship between the mother and the daughter.
Reading is similar to looking into a mirror: audiences recognize themselves in the experiences and characters on the pages. They see the good, the bad, and are brought back to experiences they had overlooked to learn something more about themselves. Some characters touch readers so intimately that they inspire readers to be better than they already are. House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, follows a young girl named Esperanza and her experiences while living on Mango Street. She is introduced with her desperate wish to escape her poor mostly-Latino neighborhood and live in a house of her own. Esperanza compares herself to her family, innocently knowing what she wants from a young ages. She is observant and holds insights into the lives of others, learning lessons from each person she encounters. While
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Lee Dugard is an autobiography recounting the chilling memories that make up the author’s past. She abducted when she was eleven years old by a man named Phillip Garrido with the help of his wife Nancy. “I was kept in a backyard and not allowed to say my own name,” (Dugard ix). She began her life relatively normally. She had a wonderful loving mother, a beautiful baby sister,, and some really good friends at school. Her outlook on life was bright until June 10th, 1991, the day of her abduction. The story was published a little while after her liberation from the backyard nightmare. She attended multiple therapy sessions to help her cope before she had the courage to share her amazing story. For example she says, “My growth has not been an overnight phenomenon…it has slowly and surely come about,” (D 261). She finally began to put the pieces of her life back together and decided to go a leap further and reach out to other families in similar situations. She has founded the J A Y C Foundation or Just Ask Yourself to Care. One of her goals was, amazingly, to ensure that other families have the help that they need. Another motive for writing the book may have also been to become a concrete form of closure for Miss Dugard and her family. It shows her amazing recovery while also retelling of all of the hardships she had to endure and overcome. She also writes the memoir in a very powerful and curious way. She writes with very simple language and sentence structures. This becomes a constant reminder for the reader that she was a very young girl when she was taken. She was stripped of the knowledge many people take for granted. She writes for her last level of education. She also describes all of the even...
I would recommend this book to a friend. This book had a very daunting perspective of a real rape victim and the author really captured the invigorating feelings and emotions of the victim that made the book alluring. I enjoyed the amount of vivid details that the author put into telling her story and believe that she could capture the attention of any reader, girl or boy. Sebold’s memoir of her rape gave a clear perspective and goes through the traumatizing experiences that she faced which draws the reader out from their world into her very own. Some parts of the book, about her past, were a little draggy and boring but along the way, her story is still able to bring you back into it. This gruesome yet strangely enchanting book would make for a truly good read for anyone.
“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs and “My Bondage and My Freedom” by Frederick Douglass were slave narratives that took upon a challenge. Both narratives deal with the same major challenge which is gaining the confidence to escape their slave settlement to find self-discovery and then seek out for their freedom. Jacobs challenge in her narrative was focused towards female slaves and gave details in what a woman slave faced with her family and slave owner. Douglass’s narrative contained a personal challenge which was to educated people about the freedom for all after his escape. Each slave narrative primarily discusses the challenges of fighting for equality and freedom through a male and female perspective.
Their situation is very relatable to teens in the 21st century. Eleanor has a very difficult home life, which is not unusual in today’s society. Richie, who is Eleanor’s stepdad, is an alcoholic who appears to despise her. He has kicked her out before and has threatened Eleanor since she’s moved back in. Richie has got her mom wrapped around his finger, which is a very dangerous and sticky situation that most cannot get out of. These are just a few of Eleanor’s difficulties, which can be very relatable to teens in today’s day and age. Eleanor & Park shows how important it is to have a complex character in order to apply to today’s society. In the book, Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor Douglas is the complex character. In the story she is forced to deal with an alcoholic stepdad and constant bullying by fellow students at her new high school. Throughout these difficult times of her life, Eleanor meets a boy named Park, who changes her life. Park becomes all the good things in life, while all the bad things become everything at home. This story wouldn’t have been complete if Eleanor hadn’t had so many complications; that’s what made Eleanor &
The book Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper is an exciting and emotional story about an African girl named Amari and her journey from Africa to America. Amari is a young girl from a lovely village in Africa then taken as a slave and working on a plantation for a really horrible plantation owner, named Mr. Derby. Amari is raped and treated horribly from the white men every day. She has no family and wants to give up hope, she wants to die. First, Amari’s journey starts off on a smelly, ruggedy ship where she is unclothed and raped every night, then she is taken to a plantation in the American Colonies, working for the Derby family where she is beaten and abused from her plantation owner, because
Similar to slave girl, the life of frederick douglass, the boy there which is frederick
How do you write about the major, live-changing events of people you've never met? How do you write about sensitive issues in an engaging, but still thought-provoking way? How do you write about your own demons so that others do not follow your path? Writer Laurie Halse Anderson could provide the answers to these questions. Written at a time when difficult topics, such as sexual harassment, were just beginning to be spoken about, her stories were a combination of her struggles and the struggles of teens across the country. Through her gift of storytelling, Laurie has brought previously taboo topics, such as date rape and depression, to the attention of teenagers and adults worldwide.
Over the summer, I read “The Journal Belongs to Ratchet” by Nancy J. Cavanaugh. This book is about a girl, named Ratchet, but her real name is Rachel. She is 11 years old, and she is homeschooled by her mechanic engineer dad. Her dad knows how to rebuild and fix cars. Ratchet helps her dad in the garage, because her dad taught her how to use the tools and what they are used for. They have moved to a lot of houses before. Her dad buys cheap houses that need renovation and he fixes it and then goes onto a new house. Ratchet doesn’t buy anything new. She gets hers clothes from goodwill. In her notebook that she is suppose to use for writing assignments, but she doesn’t use it for that. She uses her notebook for a top-secret plan to turn her old, recycled, freakish, friendless, motherless life into something shiny and new. Ratchet’s quests are to make a friend, save a park, and to find her own definition of normal.
They were forced from their home and were being wiped out of their culture. The runaways are the people stuck in a cycle. They know they cannot escape, but they keep trying because they have hope. They take the humiliation for the very small chance they will be free. Every time they get caught, they know the cycle; “ All runaways wear dresses, long green ones, the color you would think shame was. We scrub the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.” (190). Knowing their position as being the bottom, the low, embarrasses them. They are forced to wear green clothes, and do dirty work in front of all the other students. This along with their culture trying to be smothered is why the natives feel
Martinez, Ruby J. “Understanding Runaway Teens.” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing. 19.2 (2006): 77-88. ProQuest. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
Just imagine walking and jumping in bushes for hour's and running away from a house with a kid who's two years older than you. You can read about a boy named Bud who had to deal with that in his life. What you will be reading is how Bud felt during that rough time.
Three Little Words is based on a true story by a girl named Ashley Rhodes-Courter. This book talks about Ashley who went to many different foster homes and wasn’t allowed to live with her birth mother. She was a happy until she was taken away from her mother and put into a foster home. It began when Ashley, her mom, Dusty and her brother Luke were on their way to Florida until they got pulled over by the cops. The cops took Dusty away for not having license plate. A few days later they took Luke and Ashley away from their mother and put them into a foster care. Luke and Ashley didn’t stay in one home for a long time. One foster home really made a bad affect in Ashley and Luke’s life, the Moss family. They abused the two siblings and beat them every day. Ashley never believed in having a perfect place to live. The theme of the book is love, family, life and home. Love because nobody ever said they loved Ashley, family because nobody was ever there to say they cared about her, life because she needs to move to happy healthy family and home to make her feel comfortable. I really enjoyed this book because it made me realize that I have my family and some people do not have anyone..
The main character or the protagonist of this book is Wendy Everly. Wendy is seventeen years old. She has curly dark hair and brown eyes. She’s not like everyone else, Wendy’s “different”. Wendy was given off to another family at a young age because of her biological mother. Wendy’s mother tried to kill her because of Wendy not appreciating a present that was given to her on her birthday. Elora/ Wendy’s mother really loves Wendy and cares about her a lot. Another relation that Wendy has is with Finn. Finn is Wendy’s protector/ guardian. Wendy also has a brother named Matt.