In the novel, “Stolen,” by Lucy Christopher, Gemma Toombs is forced to adapt to her abductor’s life Ty, whom we soon learn his full name is Tyler MacFarlane. The story begins with Gemma and her parents en route to Vietnam. Unfortunately, whilst she is waiting for her flight she decides to go to a cafe and that is where she meets Ty. He drugs her drink while having conversation with Gemma and soon their life in the desert begins. Ty decides to bring Gemma in a deep, secluded desert in Australia. No one would think to search there. All that is there is sand and the reddish Earth. This story, as confusing as the plot was at times, was intriguing. I enjoyed how the story was narrated and portrayed. Although this story was a little repetitive, it was a factor that fit how the story was written. …show more content…
Instead of using Ty’s name or “he”, she would only use “You.” For an example, on page 58, Lucy writes, “ You were between me and the door.
Your face wild, your mouth tight and angry as you looked me over. Your eyes were dark..” Onto Gemma, the main character, I’ve discovered that her strength and her liveliness are combined from her parental issues and the urgency of a figure that outwardly shows caring to her life. This is where Ty somewhat helps with that problem. He tries to care for her and love her the way she was supposed to be. This leads to Gemma falling in love with him, although it is far too late. She soon realizes it at the end of the novel when Ty is taken away from her. On page 297 she says, “ What you did to me wasn’t this brilliant thing, like you think it was. You took me away from everything -- my parents, my friends, my life,. You took me to the sand and the heat, the dirt and isolation. And you expected me to love you. And that's the hardest part. Because I did, or at least, I loved something out there.” This story was a rollercoaster with emotions and the events that
occurred. This was an interesting and very entertaining novel even with the confusion. What I really enjoyed and found fascinating was that Lucy Christopher wrote the story as if it were a letter. She made it seem personal and something you can kind of relate to with the emotions and so on. The ending of the book makes the reader wonder whether her feelings for Ty were genuine or from Stockholm Syndrome. It makes it more intriguing. I was expecting this novel to be about Romance but it isn’t. It has a twist to it. The main genre of this book is Abduction although the emotions circulated are hope, faith and love. Throughout the confusion of the book, this story displays a lesson. Society is cruel and horrible, parents don’t understand their kids and sometimes you just can’t trust your friends. But although it doesn’t feel right, sometimes you just have to accept the bad things that happen in life and just keep moving forward. Stolen makes you think and question about your own life; about the “what if’s” and “what not’s.” You never know what can happen to you or others.
Wait Till Next Year is a book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Wait Till Next Year is a book written in Goodwin’s point of view set in Rockville Center, New York. The book begins with Goodwin’s father teaching her the scorekeeping rules of baseball in the summer of 1949. After her father taught her how to properly record a baseball game she would sit in front of the radio and listen to the game every day and would record everything each player did during that game. Then when her father would arrive home from work she would relay to him all that had happened during the game of that day. As Goodwin looks back on this in her book she begins to think that it is because of these times with her father that she has a love for history and for storytelling.
“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak is narrated by death and begins when Liesel’s brother dies on a train with her and her mother. At her brother’s burial, she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook” and soon after is separated from her mother and sent to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, in Molching, where the majority of the book takes place. At school, Liesel is teased because she can’t read so Hans teaches her to read when she wakes up from her frequent nightmares about her brother’s death. Hans is a painter and an accordion player and also plays the accordion for her after her nightmares. Liesel grows very close with Hans and also becomes close friends with her neighbor Rudy Steiner who constantly asks her to
The novel ‘A Stolen Life’ written by Jaycee Dugard is a true story about how Jaycee, at age 11, got kidnapped by two adults called Phil and Nancy. Jaycee was missing for 18 years. During those years a lot of things happened to Jaycee. She was abused, raped and had two children at a very early age. Phil and Nancy's treatment had made Jaycee grow up very fast; she had to do whatever to survive.
The diverse alternation of point of views also provides the story an effective way to reach out to readers and be felt. The characterisation is effectively done and applied as Sam, Grace, and the other supporting characters play individual, crucial roles in the course of the story. All the elements of a typical young adult novel, consisting of a gap-filled relationship between children and parents, emotion-driven teenagers, and a unique conflict that makes the book distinct from fellow novels, combined with the dangerous consequences of the challenges the couple encounter, make the book different from all other of the same genre. The plot unfolds slowly giving readers enough time to adjust and anticipate the heavy conflict when it arises. It has gotten us so hooked but the only thing we could possibly dislike about it was the slow pace of plot. The anticipation was too much to handle and we were practically buzzing and bouncing to know how the story turns out as we read. It builds the anticipation, excitement, thrill, sadness, grief, loss, and longing in such an effective way to entice and hook readers further into the world of Sam and
Prologue: On page 4 the narrator says, “Personally, I like a chocolate- colored sky. Dark, Dark chocolate. People say it suits me.”(Zusak 4) This led me to believe the narrator is death. He sees life in color because he appreciates color more because his life is so dark and filled with death, color is in our lives and our souls will soon be filled with darkness and him and not have a colorful life.
Mark of the Thief is a book written by Jennifer A. Nielsen. This book is the first in the “Mark of the Thief” trilogy and is set in ancient Rome around the year 400 CE. The story itself takes place primarily in the city of Rome and the mines south of Rome where the story begins.
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...
Plagiarism is the act of "stealing" what has already been written and said. It is not students' own original opinions, every school, especially North American schools, seriously considered the consequences of plagiarism (Nall & Gherwash, Aug 12, 2013). George Brown College and Seneca College, which are both located in Toronto, Canada, are no exception. Even though Seneca College has a more well-organized document regarding academic honesty, in particular, plagiarism, both schools take measures against plagiarism.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates is a great Southern gothic because of how we, the audience, can relate to the main characters. We know people like Arnold Friend from the newspaper clippings and books about notorious serial killers like Charles Schmid, Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson. We could be an accomplice like Ellie Oscar as Milgram’s experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and Susan Atkins shows us. Finally, we are Connie. Connie is a normal person, living a normal life, until it is ended by a cruel kidnapper which we know could be reality from the kidnapping stories of Elizabeth Smart, Anne Sluti, and Jaycee Dugard. Oates story is scary because it has the ability to be true and we, the audience, can identify with each character Arnold Friend, Ellie Oscar, and Connie.
Leaving Atlanta is a story of child disappearance. Tayari Jones, the author of Leaving Atlanta, grew up in this horrible time. She wrote about her experience growing up during this time, and also talked with us about it while visiting Peace College. By hearing her speak about these horrible events, it made me want to read the book even more. She also gave you a feeling as if you were there with her and experiencing the same thing. The book along with her speech gives better detail into this great mystery.
Throughout the novel, Still Missing written by Chevy Stevens, the protagonist, is taken on a frightening journey of being drugged, kidnapped, sexually abused, and eventually left to fend for herself. Because of the author's unique writing style and use of first person, a sense of understanding is created for the reader's feelings and reactions. At the beginning of the novel, Annie O’Sullivan was extremely oblivious to her surrounding and would never imagine something like this ever happening. As the chapters continued, and she began to reveal what happened to her the first few days, she was unsure of what to do other than to be in complete shock, unable to react and grasp the entire situation. As the reader, I was intrigued by the ‘journey’
If anything is held to the highest value in any array of schools, it is a policy against plagiarism. Academics understand the severity that plagiarism can hold, especially since many of them tend to do it to each other. In 2005, Melissa Elias, who was at the time the President of the Madison School Board, gave a commencement speech that had several sections that were plagiarized from a speech Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize winner author, had given to Mount Holyoke in 1999. Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard University Sophomore, had published a book with several portions of copied from works of four different authors. Individuals held at high academic expectations committed both of these incidents, one being the president of a school and the other being a student of an Ivy League University. However, despite their valor in academia they both plagiarized, the only difference being that Viswanathan was getting royalties for her act of plagiarism. One has to question whether there really is a difference between these two cases, because both individuals clearly intentionally plagiarized. When handling cases of plagiarism one has to be extremely cautious due to the various degrees of plagiarism that depend on the individual’s intentionality and regards to profit.
Death states that, “I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both” (Zusak 491). This book shows us human doing things that weren’t even imaginable before this point. Many people give into ideas that were lies. But, we also watch a few people go out of their way and sacrifice everything for a man they barely even know. They do everything they can to keep him safe and alive. They work harder, the get another job, and they even steal. In Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, death examines the ugliness and the beauty of humans.
At an early age, Cholly learns that his life would be extremely difficult. When he was four years old his parents abandoned him. The two people that were supposed to love him unconditionally and teach him life lessons had turned their back on him and created emotional damage. This marks the beginning of Cholly’s problematic life. Aunt Jimmy created a glimmer of hope for the future when she took on the role of his guardian. Unfortunately for Cholly, she passed away before he even hit his teenage years. Losing one parent could damage someone enough, but he lost three people that were intended to care for him. The feeling of neglect and loneliness has become all too familiar. The emotional affects are shaping Cholly into an introverted person with many internal conflicts. The...
Plagiarism is the act of taking intellectual property such as the words and ideas of others as your own without giving credit to the actual owner. Unable to view the CBS video, I read the two articles provided. I do remember when the story of Jayson Blair became news. His actions were so egregious and it amazes me that today he still fails to hold himself accountable for those actions, and instead, chooses to blame others.