English 485: Expedition Adolescence

Prisoner B-3087 is my favorite book that we have read in this class so far. Not because it was an easy read or that the book was super happy and uplifting. Rather, I feel like I was able to understand what it was like to try and survive the holocaust as a young adult. The book had me hooked from the first sentence: "If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more" (Grubner 2). Through out this book, one of the most talked about subjects was food. From the first page, to the last few chapters, we see how food is very important and crucial to Yanek's, the protagonist, survival. More specifically, bread is talked about throughout this book, mostly because this was one of the only food that the Nazi soldiers gave to the Jews in concentration camps. The first page that bread was mentioned in is on page 11 where Yanek describes the rations the Nazis gave to the Jews in his home town. He was given soup, a whole loaf of bread, a...

Prisoner B-3087 was a hard read for me. The book was well written, and an easy read, but it was hard for me to read because I just could not grasp onto the details that I was reading, because it was so painful to read. Reading this novel put my own life into perspective, and made me think of how much I take my own life for granted. I couldn’t imagine being in Yanek’s shoes during this time. Being treated like an animal, having my family taken away from me and fearing for my life daily is something I know I would not have been able to do.               The opening of the novel, “If I would have known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more. I wouldn’t have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o’clock every night. I would have played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them” (Gratz 2). This really hit me hard because these are lit...

Prisoner B-3087 was a pretty easy read for me, the only difficulty I had with this novel was that some events were incredibly rushed, so I couldn't really revel in the details of the novel and absorb what all was going on. However, the content and structure of the story was very easy to follow and read along. Although the events that Yanek experienced was briefly exposed to the reader, they were packed with such strong emotion that it moves you as a reader. The most interesting aspect of all for me as that the thought of Yanek believing he had no family left, actually motivates him more to live. This was an incredible attitude, because most people that feel as if they lose everything (especially family) their will to move forward diminishes exponentially. So, for the loss of his family being the motivation for Yanek is fascinating in his own right, and it is also his almost his "reward" for surviving the Nazis; as he is reunited with a close family friend and a few other ...

As a future English teacher and History teacher this book comes very well recommended. I think this book would be great to teach in the eight grade because not only does it have a great message, but it gives a great example of symbolism. August explains to Lily how the beehive community functions, how without the queen bee everything will fall apart. This book, like the beehive in August's yard, it is female dominated. We can see the different roles of the women throughout the book and how each one of them puts in their own valuable submission into making the "beehive" work. The bees also symbolizes structure, each little bee has a job in the beehive. No job is unimportant and they all work together to make the beehive function well. We can see it as an example given to Lily about her life. No matter how small one feels or how unimportant we feel we are important in the big picture. Each person has a role in this world. Lily felt lost and did not know where to go with her...

Firstly, I want to say that Prisoner B-3087 was such a difficult read for me. Sharissa brought up how powerful the opening lines were in our Today's Meet chat. I remember when I first began the book that those lines hit me really hard too. Yanek opens with, "If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more. I wouldn't have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o' clock every night. I would've played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them" (Gratz 2). These lines really set the tone of the entire novel in my opinion. Readers immediately realize that this novel is going to cover a really traumatic series of events in which Yanek has his childhood and his sense of normalcy ripped away from him. Many people in class brought up the themes of perseverance and determination when discussing how Yanek survives in the concentration camps. O...

                I believe that Prisoner B-3087 attempts to show a “coming of age” story through the lens of a young boy surviving through the Holocaust. However, I feel like Yanek fails to truly experience the “coming of age,” primarily due to the fact that he is forced to grow up and spend most of his adolescence in the concentration camps.                 Yanek first becomes a man at his bar mitzvah. The book reads, “The Torah scrolls were taken out and unrolled so I could read from them. My Hebrew was rough… I muddled through, and if God or man heard anything amiss, neither of them called me on it” (46). He undergoes his ceremony and he is celebrated for his newfound manhood. However, his ‘rough’ Hebrew shows that this ceremony was not a true one, not one that would normally be considered done correctly. This bar mitzvah’s incompleteness only set the stage for Yanek’...

In brief, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone  is about a boy who loses his parent to a "car accident", Harry Potter, who lives with his negligent and aggressive Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, and cousin Dudley Dursley. Since Harry lives with this extended family, he is treated with utmost disrespect for a reason he knows not of: he, like his mother and father, has the capability of possessing magical powers.In order to repress Harry from knowing and keeping their own reputation clean, the Dursleys treat Harry horribly and lie to him about his parents' death as well as his background.  So, from as far as Harry can remember he has been treated poorly by his aunt and uncle, and never fully understood the reason why, that is, until Hagrid (the giant from the magical world) crashes into his life and tells him the truth about how his parents died and what Harry truly is, a wizard. Then Harry leaves with Hagrid and begins his wizardly life at a wizardly school and begins to ...

       Sometimes in life we have to jump. If we do not jump we will never know what it feels like to fly and soar through the sky. We are so afraid to jump because we are scared, and don't want to hit the rocks on the way down. When we jump, our wings do not appear right away, so we just want to linger around and play it safe, so we don't get scratched up. Now, while we are lingering around and playing it safe, we see people soaring by and begin to feel trapped. Then, we have to make the decision, are we going to jump and fly?          Fourteen year old Lily has to make the decision to soar, or not. The bees serve as an extended metaphor throughout this novel. In the first chapter we learn that Lily's room is filled with bees, literally. She can hear them buzzing in the walls, and they come out at night to swarm around her room. One night, she ran and got her dad: "I don't hear any buzzing, I guess they flew out of that cuckoo clock you call...

Feed by M.T. Anderson was a great, interesting read. When my group and I first picked this book to read I wasn’t too certain that I would like it, then after reading the first couple of pages, I was definitely sure that I wasn’t going to like the book, but after I kept reading and the story line picked up, I couldn’t put the book down. This is a YA novel that I normally would not read by my own choice, I’m usually a sucker for the cheesy love story, romantic YA novels but Feed is so DIFFERENT, and that’s what I loved about it the most. Titus, the main character, and his friends live in the near future where taking spring break vacations to the moon is a thing and so is having a Feed in your head. To sum up the feed, it’s basically like having a computer in your head. Titus and his friends have become so accustomed to the feed that they cannot live properly without it, the feed controls their lives. From the way they do their hair and they clothes they wear, it is also decided b...

When I begin  reading Feed by M.T Anderson, I was   slightly worried because it didn’t seem to grasp my interest. I really couldn’t connect with the book at first because I didn’t understand the setting, plot, or what was going on at the beginning of the story. Luckily, by  the end of the story I was happy that I read this book because I enjoyed it. Feed is a story where  73% of society depends on  technology  to survive in a world that they know nothing about other than what the chip inside their head tells them. Titus is  the main character who had the feed implanted at birth, so most of his  experiences  with life has been influenced by technology. Titus meets a girl who is different from him and his group of friends, Violet. Violet unlike the other teens didn’t have the feed implanted until the age seven, so most of her life has consist of knowledge and things she had to learn about without the feed.    T he relationship...

   In J.K. Rawlings first book of her critically acclaimed Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone , Harry is only a young boy feeling doomed and alone, when suddenly his whole life changes in a flash. When Harry learns that he is a famous wizard all thanks to his friendly giant pal, Hagrid, he finds himself dazzled by the many mysteriously beautiful and fascinating shops of Diagon Alley. After being flustered by his inheritance and buying all the necessary magical equipment needed for success at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry meets two people who are going to change his life completely, Ron Weasly and Hermione Granger. In this blog post, I want to talk about the course that life can sometimes take and how Harry Potter stands as a heroic symbol for children and adults alike, as well as the power of friendship between Harry, Ron, and Hermoine in relation to the first Harry Potter book,  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  ...

All the Bright Places is an emotionally riveting book that makes love, light and living all intertwine in a YA novel. Violet’s sister died in a car crash and Violet hasn’t been the same since. She shows signs of depression and totally disengages from her previous life. Finch is the school freak who is extreme in all things. He is obsessed with death and “feels numbness when he is alive” (94). They meet on a bell tower ledge at their school, where they’re both contemplating suicide. They save one another and end up falling for each other. This book really takes on a challenging perception of teenage love. They don’t lock eyes and immediately fall in love, but they grow a bond over the attempt to take their lives. They are two people who are trying to find themselves and discover their true selves within one another. This quest for identity plays a major role in ATBP. Finch feels out of his own skin, he hates the numbing buzz of being alive and only feels the rush of life when he is on ...

All The Bright Places is the type of book that made me fall in love with literature as an adolescent. Dynamic, Byronic Heroes like Finch, and slightly tragic, complicated female leads like Violet make for a powerful read. The characters in this book are what make the book compelling. The other themes of mental health, distant parents, romance, and friendship in adolescence are also important, but it is the intrinsic development of the characters that hook the reader, and push the reader to hang on throughout the rollercoaster of events in the novel. Although I do believe compelling characters are a staple of adolescent literature, All The Bright Places does it quite well. Finch’s voice is crystal clear, although his clinical Bipolar disorder inherently blurs and confuses his emotions and perceptions of events. The beginning of the novel starts on Day 6, and the opening chapter is entitled “I am awake again”. It is heartbreaking to know that Finch does not have a ...

When I first started reading Feed , I was very disappointing. I thought it was very slow and almost stupid. The vocabulary of the protagonist, Titus, was not what I thought a high-schooler's vocabulary should be-- it was terrible. Titus used the word "like" obsessively while also using slang like "mal" that I had no idea what it meant. He sounded uneducated. After I read the book more, I found out that the reason he talked like he did was because of a chip-like program installed in his brain. It was called Feed. When he first talked about it, he said that it started as computers outside of the body and then transitioned into the Feed. The Feed is the internet, ads, social media, and tv all inside your head. With the Feed, Titus is able to message his friends through their feed too. It is a very interesting concept. The thing that scares me the most about this book is the fact that we are not far from that. Once Titus and his friends got hacked at a party, thei...

                 The Secret Life of Bees is a book that is truly all about feminism and women empowerment. It can be seen across the book, from beginning to end. With a class consisting of primarily women, myself being the only exception, I think we can easily delve into the topic of feminism and all come to agreement with ease that women are pretty amazing all around. This book just proves that point even more. Rosaleen is the first we see of these empowered women. She has taught herself how to read and write in secret, in attempts to get a chance to vote in the elections. The narrator tells us “Her name, Rosaleen Daise, was written twenty-five times at least down the page in large, carful cursive, like the first paper you turn in when school starts” (27). Then Rosaleen says, “For the Fourth of July they’re holding a voters’ rally at the colored church. I’m registering myself to vote” (27). Even after getting beaten, thrown in jail, beat...

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a story of a young girl trying to find her identity in the midst of racism and segregation. Lily is a white teenager that runs away from home and finds solace at a bee farm with three sisters. We follow Lily through various struggles as we see her mature into the person she becomes at the end of the novel, finding her happy place with the bees. One of my favorite parts of the book as a whole was the extensive amount of symbolism in the story. It wasn’t one of the stories where you had to pick out the symbolism, but here it was extremely obvious. The author chose to open each chapter with a reference to bees that we can somehow relate it back to the protagonist. The bees in the novel served as Lily’s guides in the novel. We see them talked about from the very beginning when they came out from behind the walls and she tried to wake up T. Ray to see them. It’s almost as if the bees were encouraging to leave the house and eventually led her t...