Final Exam

Mary Higgins Clark and Jodi Picoult are two completely different authors; Clark writes horror stories while Picoult writes romance novels. They do have one thing in common: the books they wrote about losing children. Mary Higgins Clark’s Two Little Girls in Blue and Jodi Picoult’s The Pact both have main characters that lose their children. In Two Little Girls in Blue, Margret and Steve Frawley have twins, Kelly and Kathy, who are kidnapped the night after their third birthday. In The Pact, Emily Gold and Chris Harte decide to commit suicide together. Whether horror or romance novel, the parents are devastated.  

Melanie and Michael Gold are incredibly dejected upon receiving the news of their daughter, Emily’s, death. The Gold’s best friends and neighbors, the Hartes’ son, Chris, was found alive and covered in Emily’s blood. The Golds have no choice but to blame Chris, who claimed it was a double suicide that failed. Picoult allows room for suspicion of Chris killing Emily by adding facts about the way the gun was held. It was held at an angle as if someone standing in front of her shot her. Clark uses the same technique of accusing someone close to the family of the crime. Margret and Steve Frawley have identical twins, Kathy and Kelly. After their third birthday party, the Frawley’s have a black tie party to go to so they ask Trish Logan to baby sit. After Trish is rendered unconscious, the twins are kidnapped. The Frawley’s new neighbor, Franklin Bailey, announced on live television that he would be happy to be the “go between” man for the Pied Piper (the kidnapper) to contact. On page seventeen, Bailey says “If I can be any help as contact person for the kidnappers, I’m available.” When the police realize they have no evidence of anyone kidnapping the Frawley twins, they accuse Bailey. Both of the authors try to throw off the readers by accusing someone close to the family, it doesn’t matter what genre the book is, they both used the same technique.

After the Frawley’s discover that Kelly is the only twin that’s alive, they grieve in different ways. Steve is focused on finding the killer and masking his grief. All Margret does is mope around and wallow in her depression. When think about her children missing, on page thirteen Clark says, “Margret dropped the cup of tea she was holding and winced as hot tea splattered all over the blouse and skirt she had bought…for tonight’s black-tie company dinner at the Waldorf.” After Melanie Gold discovers the death of her child, she also mopes around and thinks about her late daughter, Emily, all day. Her husband, Michael, tries to figure out if his neighbor that he’s known for seventeen years really is a murderer or if his own daughter was suicidal and he didn’t know. The women do the same thing: grieve their child, while the men do the same thing: find the murderer of their little girl.

Both of the authors kill a female child: Kathy Frawley, a three year old toddler, and Emily gold, a seventeen year teenager. This was a way for the author to evoke more emotion from the reader. Women are typically seen as gentle people so killing them evokes anger because they have no chance against a big, strong man. Kathy is three, she can’t defend herself. This evokes immense anger because everyone loves children. Killing Emily also evokes anger because Chris killed her; the guy she’s grown up with since literally birth, and fell in love with in the process, has killed her.

No matter the genre or author, you can use any technique to evoke emotion from your reader.

My Top Five Favorite Books

How true should a book be?

It should be 99% true. If a line is bent, it’s not a line anymore; if the truth is bent, it’s not the truth anymore. To be a non-fiction book, almost everything said should be able to be backed up by factual evidence. Authors should be given a little wiggle room though. They could take out small details that are boring and just hold the story back. If you’re writing a story about Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, you don’t want to add a bunch of irrelevant astrophysical equations; no one wants to read about that. Also, the dialogue isn’t going to be 100% true; no one knows or remembers the exact words said between Houston Control and the astronauts on the shuttle. The author of a non-fiction novel can leave things out and reword things that happened, but they shouldn’t be adding any fictional events or characters to the story. It’s important to keep the story going but it’s more important to keep your non-fiction novel, non-fiction.   

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Book Trailer

Reading in English class

Why should kids read when they can just go on Wikipedia and look up the same information? You want me to learn about discrimination between blacks and whites? I won’t read The Color of Water; I’ll go on the internet and research it. Why do high school teachers force their students to read? It’s not the information about the book that teachers are trying to make you understand, it’s the lesson learned in the novel. In The Color of Water, James is a half-black, half-white child. His mother is white and his father is black. The book takes you through the journey and hardships of growing up in a black community when your mother is white. He’s half black so the whites don’t respect him and he’s half white so the blacks don’t respect him. Yes, you could learn about discrimination through research on Wikipedia or you could SparkNotes the book, but why do that when you can experience, first hand, exactly what it’s like to be a race that no one likes? SparkNotes doesn’t tell you about how the Chicken Man helped James realize the type of man he didn’t want to be. Wikipedia doesn’t tell you how someone feels when their mother rides a bike and sings to herself. Google doesn’t explain how a white woman feels when she is pregnant with a black man’s child, whom she loves, but can never be with. The fact that it’s James McBride experiencing the racism of his time doesn’t really matter. It’s the fact that you are applying knowledge you’re learning to an actual plot-based story.

Adapting "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

Adapting Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer would be very difficult to do. I haven’t seen the movie yet because I haven’t finished the book but my sister said it was very sad. I don’t understand how it’d me sad because the book is perverted and confusing, not sad like at all.

One scene in the book that would be essential to keep in the movie would be the scene when Oskar, the main character, went into his parents’ bedroom and found a vase. He dropped it and it shattered. Inside was an envelope when the world “Black” written in red ink. Inside of the envelope was a key. He travels to a locksmith and finds out that the key belongs to “some kind of lockbox,” (Foer 39). This scene begins the journey that Oskar travels throughout the whole book. If the director left out this scene, movie wouldn’t match the book at all.

Another scene in the book that would need to be kept in the movie is the scene where Oskar gets home from school and listens to voicemails on the home phone. He hears his father leaving messages to let the family know that he’s okay. This scene is important because you experience the death of his father. This is also essential for the movie to mimic the book because if this scene was left out then Oskar would have never found the key.

The last part of the book that shouldn’t be left out of the movie isn’t really a scene just a detail of the book. Oskar only wears the color white. This was left out of the movie, obviously. It’s never explained why he only wears white but throughout the whole book, anytime he receives clothes that aren’t white he says something like “too bad it’s not white”. Foer makes the point that Oskar only wears white so many times in the book which means the author obviously believes it’s important or he had a reason for it.

One scene in the book that wasn’t important or essential for the movie is the scene where Oskar’s mom is laughing and talking to Ron. It’s not important because they’re not dating and it’s never really mentioned again after that scene at the beginning.

Another scene that’s not necessary for the movie is when Oskar’s grandma’s and grandpa’s stories explain that his grandpa dated the grandma’s sister. It’s not important because I don’t think that its relevant at all because it didn’t change or help the story line.  

Book 1 Project

In the book I read, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, There’s a game that Peter Houghton creates in order to “practice” the school shooting he’s planning. Peter is the one guy in the whole school that every single person hates. Everyone in the “in” crowd calls him names and makes fun of him for having a crush on Josie. It really isn’t his fault because Peter and Josie were best friends until she became part of the “in” crowd in seventh grade. Now, their senior year, he still likes her but she’s dating the most popular guy, Matt. Okay so in the game you are a teenage boy with freckles and glasses. First, you have to pick your weapon. Then you run around the school and shoot the people that have made fun of peter. Actually creating the game would give readers a way to better understand the process Peter went through to kill ten people and shoot nineteen. 

The way Picoult writes is very different. She writes out of order so one chapter could be about the shooting and then the next is about what happened three years ago. This game is mentioned in the middle of the book but Peter creates it about a week before he actually takes the two hand guns and two sawed off shot guns to school to shoot twenty-nine people. This game mimics Peter running in through the front door, down the hall to the bathroom, around the corner to the cafeteria, then through the gym to the locker room. This is the pathway the computer game takes you to shoot other students and teachers. Peter was forced to use the stalls in the restroom because other guys would call him “homo”. Matt Royston pulled down Peter’s pants (and underwear) in front of the entire cafeteria. In gym he always picked last. In the locker room, the guys called him “homo” and broke his glasses in half. These events caused Peter to target those specific areas of the school to shoot.

This game could help broaden the audience by showing people who get bullied or computer game addicts that Jodi Picoult doesn’t just write “chick flicks”. Typically, Picoult writes stories that interest teenage girls because they’re about teenage girls and their problems. Yes this book revolves around Josie Cormier’s love triangle but Peter is the main character.  This could help encourage readers to stay connected with the book because, no judging, I was on Peter’s side. When he was being interviewed by the detective, Patrick Ducharme, Patrick asked why he did it and Peter said, “They started it” (Picoult). At first Peter is the antagonist because Josie is shown as the main character but as you keep reading you realize Peter only did it because Josie, Matt, Emma, Courtney, Drew, and Maddie provoked him. This game could help readers understand what Peter’s process was when running through the school and shooting.