English 485: Expedition Adolescence

 Scythe by Neal Shusterman is a great novel that serves as a great introduction to Dystopian stories for younger readers as well as an introduction to darker themes in books. Aside from that, even as someone who is familiar with other Dystopian stories, the novel is subversive enough to stick out amongst the rest of the genre. The general plot focuses on two teens, Rowan and Citra are recrutied by a Scythe to become trainees however, only one can be chosen. The situation changes when they are challenged to kill the other once one has become a Scythe themselves. The story is told through various points of view with a third person omnescient narrator, the main characters are Rowan and Citra, but the book will give us various perspecitves of other characters. Speaking of which, the characters are good, but I think more could have been done to fleshout thier arcs as well as one character having a huge moment of plot induced stupidity. Other than that, I really enjoyed this book and wha...

     I haven't quite finished Sold yet, I have a little over 100 pages left. However, Sold is an incredibly written book. The content itself is heavy and slightly intense at times even without me going through it myself. Patricia McCormick understands the weight and through her use of verses, she takes the beautiful lines and makes it bearable.     It's taken me a little longer to finish because I had to keep stopping in certain spots. I still plan to finish the book and it will definitely be one of those books that I will keep with me for the rest of my life. The way the words were written and how strong Lakshmi is has stuck in my brain. Over the last few weeks I will think of what I've read of Sold so far from time to time.     I enjoyed how the topic of sex trafficking was addressed. Not many people have the bravery or right state of mind to accomplish a book like this. I feel like for those who read it, and especially if you are m...

 Patricia Mcormick's book Sold is an excellent resource for raising awareness about human trafficking victims. It can also be used as a tool to help victims find the words to explain what happened to them. The book was written in such a way that it softens the punch of reality, giving the reader just enough detail to comprehend what is going on but not so much that it becomes overly graphic. The ultimate purpose of this book I beleive, was to inform people who don't know anything about human trafficking in a digestible manner rather than having them read a graphic description in a newspaper. I also believe that Mcormick wanted to instill hope into both victims and readers alike so that we can work towards making a world where this doesn't happen. The ending exists as that flicker of hope, we want to see Lakshmi escape and get back to her Mother, but in the real world we also want real victims to escape. Overall I beleive this book exists as a call of sorts to inform and ad...

I've never read a book about this real-life subject before, and I think Sold was the best possible book I could have read of it. Of course it was heart-wrenching and horrifying, but the eloquence and beauty of the verse, the way Patricia McCormick wrote it, made it possible to get through. In any other style, a book like this would have been dense, too graphic, too heavy in every sense, and despite not having gone through something like this myself, I would not have been able to make it through. This book was fast-paced, and despite the final line of a lot of the poems snapping my heart in half, the reading just flowed for me, while resonating. McCormick put a lot of work into this, by interviewing people who had actually been through it, and you could feel that in her writing. It was simple, with beautiful figurative language, and, while the content was unspeakably sickening, and the tears I was crying for most of it were heart-break, they were also cathartic. And while I was hopi...

 This novel definitely takes the cake for how dark and disturbing the content is. At least for me. I remember that when I got to the first "time" when Lakshmi was drugged, I had to take a little break just because of the anger and absolute horror I felt for that child. As I mentioned before in class, I do not believe that I would come out of something like that without breaking in some way and the women in the Happiness House continued to live and survive in those conditions day after day, still being able to laugh after what was being done to them.  Unlike all of the previous books we have read, this one I would not teach to younger grade levels. Juniors and seniors in high school would be a more appropriate demographic. Not that we shouldn't raise awareness in the younger kids, but this novel is definitely not the one to do it with. Some parts were just too vivid, even if the author did not particularly use extremely descriptive phrasing or graphic wording during the mo...