Compare and Contrast

I compared two books, In Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor: Icek Kuperberg and Hostage To War: a true story by Tajana Wassiljewa. Both of these books are holocaust survivors and they both involve their lives in war and how they survived through it but their was surprisingly many differences. I felt like Icek Kuperberg was treated more poorly than Tatjana Wassiljewa. They said that Icek Kuperberg was ordered 25 lashes for being "lazy" whereas Tatjana was just "shouted at...very angrily" for slacking off. I'm wondering if it was more due to gender or if it was due to the camps that they were in. Both of these articles contradict about life in war. But this shows that even two of the same situations could really have a lot of differences. 

   

I'll give you the POV

I'll give you the sun by Jandy Nelson is about two twins, Noah and Jude who were "inseparable" but a conflict causes them to separate and they go years without talking but they don't know that they need each other to complete the story. The book also goes back and forth between the present and future. Perspective takes a really big part in this book. It is told from two different points of view, the past with Noah and the future with Jude. The story goes back and forth between now and the future. The books comes together though to resolve the conflict and reveal what happened to them. 

Reality

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell is about two kids in high school who were completely different but somehow made a connection and later fell in love with each other but with situations in Eleanor's home, it was hard.

I feel like Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell could connect to the real world because their regular teenagers living life. Eleanor has lot of problems in her life and at home that lots of people could connect too. This book could actually give people an idea of how to get through it. Park has a pretty good life but theirs also stuff that people could relate too with him.

Confusing Conflicts

                 A part that is confusing to me in the book Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell is why Eleanor won't confess to the way that her life is at home. Her step-father is an abusive alcoholic. Eleanor explains in the book that she hates the way she lives at home but then she decides not to say anything about it. She also always says how she's gotten the urge to report her father after he would do terrible things to the mother but she never did it. There really was nobody stopping her because even if she didn't have a way to contact the police from her home, she could've easily found someone that did. I think that this is important though because it kind of shows the situations that kids have. They don't know how to help themselves in this situation like Eleanor and I think that it's important for kids to know exactly what to do in these situations.

Diversity Can Bring You Together

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell is about two kids in high school who were completely different but somehow made a connection and later fell in love with each other but with situations in Eleanor's home, it was hard.

About halfway into this book, I learned that it is okay to be different. Eleanor was a completely different person. She liked different things than everyone and found interests in different things and wasn't up to date with style and music but life at home was the reason to that. But even if things were tough, she still found love. Park still found something to connect to her with which was her music and comic books. This really brought them together even though they were two completely different people.

Obstacles of a Holocaust Surviver

          Hostage To War by Tatjana Wassiljewa is a memoir. The story is about Tatjana, a girl who was sent as a captive laborer in 1942 during World War II. The memoir goes over her childhood, where she strived for food, her captivity and how her life was like in the camps, and her freedom at the end and what she did when she was out of the camps.

            I think that the external conflict that Tatjana went through before the war was fighting for her life. Her family had very little food and Tatjana's mother had to put in her all to find food for her kids and husband. An example of having very little food is when Tatjana said, "We had had nothing to eat for many days. Not even the smallest crumb." Tatjana's way of over coming this was walking 100 kilometers which is about 62 miles to the corn regions to support her family during a really bad snow storm. This really shows how she put her family before anything. Tatjana could've easily died from starvation and hypothermia but she did all that she could as a young 13 year old girl to help her family. Hard work pays off though because at the end of her journey, she was able to feed her family.

Looking '4-ward' to 4th quarter.

I think that the most exciting thing that I look forward to is the end of the year trips, dinner dance, and most of all graduating. I feel like the school year flew by and in a month I'll be graduating!

Compare and Contrast

                                         

I'm comparing my book Perect by Natasha Friend to this poem.
They're similar because perfection IS Isabelle's enemy. That's what she was always striving for.
To be perfect like everyone else.
It messed with her until she got to the point of suffering from bulimia.

"Have you heard of something called the halo effect?... It means that people who are good-looking, people who are beautiful like your friend Penelope, are often perceived as being perfect simply because they are beautiful. We're so blinded by the prettiness, we don't see the imperfections. We don't see them as real people, with real flaws. In fact, we see them as smarter, nicer...cooler than the average person." 

That quote from the book Is showing how she slowly became her enemy and how. She always just thought that it's all about being perfect and smart and no flaws but it got to the best of her

I think one main difference from this poem and the book is the way they became to think this way. I think that the person in the poem just thought negatively about herself and wasnt happy but with Isabelle, her father had passed away and she began to eat so much and just couldn't stop so it caused her to feel terrible at the end and would throw it all up.

Answers to Famous Last Words

          Famous Last Words by Katie Alender is about a girl named Willa. Her father passed away and she struggled to move on from it but her mom clearly moved on and got re-married to a Hollywood film director, Johnathan. Willa and her mom move to Hollywood, where a serial killer is on the loose, with Jonathan to have a new start but Willa is too caught up in the past and constantly tries to contact her father's spirit but instead ends up contacting someone who was murdured by the serial killer in that house. The serial killers way of killing people was to reenact old movie death scenes.

          In my last blog, I wrote about what confused me in the book and now that I've finished it, I understand. I had said that "she always tries to contact her dad's spirit but all she gets is things like strange messages on her mirror, reflections that aren't hers, and dead bodies in her swimming pool. How come she can't see her dad?" I found out that it was because she always contacted a person who was a victim of Serial killer in that house and  she was trying to help Willa find who it was. I also asked if her trying to contact her dad connected to the serial killer and it did in a way but it also didn't.

Questions to Famous Last Words by Katie Alender

          Famous Last Words by Katie Alender is about a girl named Willa. Her father passed away and she struggled to move on from it but her mom clearly moved on and got re-married to a Hollywood film director, Johnathan. Willa and her mom move to Hollywood with Jonathan to have a new start but Willa is too caught up in the past and constantly tries to contact his sprite which causes end to see things such as dead bodies in a pool. Another thing is that a serial killer is on the loose in Hollywood and his way of murdering them is to reenact murder scenes from old movies.

          Something that is confusing to me in this book is that she always tries to contact her dad's spirit but all she gets is things like strange messages on her mirror, reflections that aren't hers, and dead bodies in her swimming pool. How come she can't see her dad? But I also wanna know how this connects to the serial killer or if it even does connect to the serial killer.

You don't have to be perfect to fit in...

          Perfect by Natasha Friend is about a girl named Isabelle Lee who is 13 and suffers from an eating disorder. She was caught trying to make herself throw up by her little sister "Ape Face" and had to join an eating disorder and body image therapy group. An A-Ha moment that my character had was when she realized that nobody is perfect. She states in the book, "in she walked: Ashley Barnum. The Ashley Barnum...First of all, the name Ashley Barnum. Royalty, right?.. She has blue eyes, surfer girl hair, and perfect thighs... Captain of the field hockey team...voted most popular girl." She was confused on why Ashley was even in a therapy group but she later became friends with her and Isabelle realized that even the most perfect girl had her flaws.

          I feel like teens can relate to this book because they are beginning to compare themselves with these people that are what they consider perfect and they begin to start an unhealthy habit of trying to be like them but it's really only hurting themselves. Teens need to know that even those perfect people aren't so perfect and this book can teach them that.

Genocide

How and why do genocides happen? What can we do about it?

Genocides happen when a race, ethnicity, religion or basically anything that makes you who you are isn't socially accepted where you are and people want to do something to completely get rid of you. All of the groups we worked on such as Sudan and Rwanda, they people from there weren't wanted. They started going on mass killing to completely erase them out. Nobody has any tolerance for anything and that's what we need to learn. You may not like a certain race, sexuality, religion ect., but you have to learn to deal with it because it does start conflict.

Striving to find "The Body in the Woods" by April Henry

          The Body in the Woods by April Henry is a book about three characters, Alexis, Nick, and Ruby. They're all apart of a program called SAR or in other words, search and rescue. They all were called into SAR to look for an autistic man that got lost in the woods but instead, they end up finding a dead body of a teenaged girl and their mission is to find the killer but also balance their lives at home. I think that the theme in this book is to never give up. I think this because they were always striving to find more evidence even if they weren't supposed to and even if things got hard at their homes or they didn't feel like they were good enough, they still did what had to be done. Alexis always stayed with the fear of, "Was her mom asleep? Gone? With someone? Dead?" because she had a mental illness but she keeps on going in life and joins SAR to get good college applications. Ruby had to deal with her parents not wanting her to be "exposed to stuff like that in real life," because as she's in SAR, she is exposed to dead people but she fights so she could be in it. Nick want to be in the military but struggles with the fear of not being brave enough but he joins SAR to fight that fear so he can prove that he's worthy enough to join the military.

          People can relate to this because people always have other people trying to bring them down. You can't let was other people say stop you from doing something that you really love.

Adversity

          Adversity that Anne faced was trying to be the better child. She was always compared to Margot. Margot did everything right and wasn't rude and didn't disobey people.  Margot was always the better person and sometimes it kind of discouraged Anne and made her feel down. I feel like happens to me sometimes. I feel as if my older sister does everything right and I'm the bad person in some situations but you just have to get over it sometimes and look past it and see what you can do better in the future. I think that people might feel this way at least a few times in their life. 

Why people were bystanders and up standees during World War II.

           I think the reason  that many people stood by during World War II wash because they were all scared. If you even thought about standing up to the nazis or actually stood up to stop the Nazis and you were caught, you were sent to a concentration camp immediately. I think that it would've really took people a lot of courage to stand up to something like this and they would've had to really experience something to actually do something about it.  Like one story where it didn't really effect a man until he actually saw what was going on behind the walls of the concentration camp and it really effected him and he then has lots of power to do things. I think that I would've been a bystander too in this situation because I would feel as if I couldn't do anything about it and it would have to take a lot out of me to actually do something to stop it.

PR is where I will end up

          Puerto Rico is where I would want to visit. This is a small island with about 3 million people.   I've been wanting to go here for quite a while because I haven't been in a while but it's a really nice place to relax, and soak in the sun. They have really nice beaches to go to like caja de muertos and flamenco beach, Old San Juan to go to, and a lot of nice tourist attractions such as Parque Nacional Cavernas de Rio Camuy which is caves, the bioluminescent bay which is organisms that make the water glow at night, and San Juan National Historic Site which is an old fort.

Reading Blog #8 Trash by Andy Mulligan

          Trash by Andy Mulligan takes place in a third world and is about three boys who live in a dump site. All they do all day is just rummage through all of the junk. One day, while the boys were searching, they found something that the police were searching for but instead of turning it in, they keep it and the story revolves around the uneducated boys to deal with all of the consequences that come along with keeping the bag. I think the theme in Trash is to not let your background underestimate you. Raphael, Rat, and Gardo were very poor boys and some of them didn't even have parents. The boys had no guidance whatsoever in this large journey of theirs but still manages to succeed even with big problems. I know that Rat is called Rat because he has no parents and all he really has in rodents as family. And most of the people in that third world "live in boxes...stacked up tall and high".. This shows how poor they were and how some were family less.

Reading Blog #7 Compare and Contrast

          I feel like the book Blackbox by Julie Schumacher and Backlash by Sarah Darer Littman are books that have both similarities and differences. They're both similar because they both involve having a sister who becomes depressed. In Blackbox, Elena's older sister, Dora, becomes depressed and Elena is affected poorly and in Backlash, Sydney's older sister, Lara, becomes depressed and Sydney is affected poorly. The reasons are different though. Dora just naturally becomes depressed. She stopped doing her homework, she lost a lot of weight, she slept too much, and she wasn't doing her hair anymore but nobody knew the reason why whereas in Backlash, Lara became depressed over bullying. She was cyber bullied and it caused her to attempt suicide. A similarity is that they both attempted and they both did it the same way. Lara was found in a bath tub with empty bottles of pills and Dora was found shaking on the floor with little tablets rained down on the floor. The stories are both similar and different. Sydney and Elena both go through the same things too. Having to deal with everything people say at school and trying to ignore it.

New Year's Resolution

          My New Year's resolution is to become more focused on school work. I find myself procrastinating lately. The steps I will take is setting up times to do certain things and take away the things that distract me. I'm looking forward to making sure all school work is done before it's too late and night and not doing homework in the morning like I do a lot.

Reading Blog #6 Blackbox by Julie Schumacher

          Blackbox is a realistic fiction story about a 14 year old girl named Elena who has a sister named Dora that was hospitalized and sent to an illness ward due to depression. Elena finds herself dealing with problems throughout the story because everyone is is it focused on Dora but once Dora gets out of the ward, Elena begins to only focus on Dora.

          I like this story so far because it shows how Elena really is trying out do whatever she can in her power to make sure that Dora is okay and safe. Even if it's little things, she still tries. Like when Dora was in the hospital, Elena, "brought Dora's favorite pajama pants and a sweatshirt that said 'IOWA SURF CLUB'(...)". This is showing how by bringing what Dora really liked that she cared about Dora and that was the most she could do at them moment. This is how any other family should be though. Helping family out in the hard times. Even if it something little, it doesn't matter. It's the thought that counts. You've at least tried.