Summer Reading 2014:Hook

I’m going to run you through a quick summary of the book In Darkness by Nick Lake. Anyway the main character in my book is trapped in a hospital trapped under rubble and he cant get get out. I guess you could say that he I stuck between a rock and a hard place bad um tiss haha…no one okay. Seriously though not to be made fun of. He is a young Haitian boy who has been dealt every crappy hand that could be given to him in life. Events in his early childhood cause him to join a gang in Haiti and his life just doesn’t look good. He ends up getting shot and put in a hospital and just to top an earthquake crushes the building and he is trapped. So now that your caught up I think that the part that hooked me was when he said “I have no name”  this got to me because it shows how much he gave up and just imagine how deep you would have to be into yourself to get rid of your name to your self. It just hit me and that’s what made me want to keep reading.  

Summer Reading 2014: I Keep it 3 Hunna

      Of all of the books I saw on the list that I could choose from the reason that I chose In Darkness by Nick Lake was because in all the summaries I read for the books on the list I thought this book would perhaps be the least depressing. Boy oh boy was I wrong I mean every book summary was just completely sad and my friends that are reading some of the other books on the list all say the same thing. Now I cant figure out if the school is just trying to send every sophomore student at Mason High School into a deep, deep state of relentless turmoil. Or whether they are trying to show us that the world is a relentless, excuse my language, bitch that will chew you up and in the case of my book bury you in rubble in a hospital. Anyway I actually did kind of enjoy the book it was brutal and very explicit in some parts but the author needed to do that to portray his message. I couldn’t really find any personal connections to this novel except for perhaps the time that I fell off my bike and scraped my knee really bad and I kind of just laid there for a while thinking what did I do to deserve this. Was it because I didn’t do the dishes? Was it because I didn’t tie my shoes right? Or was it just the divine intervention from god himself to slow me down so that I would not cross the street a mile away and get hit by a car speeding through my neighborhood? Maybe, maybe not.

  I would recommend this book to any deep thinkers out there who enjoy picking apart a novel.

Summer Reading 2014: Complex Characters

      I will start this by a very brief summary of the story. Shorty is a young boy living in Haiti and basically some major events happen in his life that cause him to join a gang and this ganglife ends up landing him in the hospital with a bullet wound. While he is in the hospital the earth quakes hit and he is trapped in the dark hospital starving, dying. So he begins to reflect on his life. Shorty has a complicated life and these major events in the beginning of the story that cause him to go into the gangs are when he witnesses his father being murdered and his twin sister being kidnapped by an Anti Aristide gang. Shorty having been born and raised in site soley, one of the poorest and most dangerous slums of haiti, turns to the pro Aristide gang in haiti and joins them in an effort to find his sister. The dedication to find his sister is what really drives every decision that young shorty make in the story. Some themes that I believe are appearing through the story are how far are you willing to go for what you want and what is worth doing to get to that goal. My book is structured with pages and chapters?  

Summer Reading 2014: Major Characters

     I chose the book In Darkness by Nick Lake, it is set in the earth quake torn haiti where hospitals have fallen into rubble and street gangs have taken over the area. Some of the major characters in the book are Shorty Marguerite (Shorty’s sister) and Shorty’s father.  Also Toussaint l’Ouverture   takes a lead role in the thoughts of young shorty. The Main conflict in the story is an internal one of shorty, who in the beginning of the story is trapped in a hospital that had fallen during the earthquake in Haiti. Young shorty while in the dark hell hospital begins to look back on his life and try and figure out what led him to that point in his life. For these nostalgic thoughts he turns to someone who died over 200 years ago, Toussaint l’Ouverture.  With Toussaint in mind he reminisces about his life, comparing and contrasting decisions he has made.  If I had to think of one thing to connect this book to it would be a show on HBO called The Wire. Even though the Wire is set in Baltimore and about American gang life, the brutality portayed in the show reminded me of the gut wrenching story of shortys life.