What else could you ever need?
For this week, we were given the theme of "love." One of the most interesting things about this theme is how broadly it can be interpreted. We can discuss it from the perspective of romantic love, friendly love, familial love, true love, or even twisted love! So, for something different, I decided to focus on the last one: twisted love. I read Stolen by Lucy Christopher, and this book was written by a sixteen-year-old girl documenting her experience with a kidnapper.
While waiting for a flight, Gemma leaves her parents in the terminal and goes to get a cup of coffee. A really cute stranger offers to doctor her coffee for her, and--unbeknownst to her--slips some sort of drug in with the sugar. He whisks her away and changes her appearance enough to get her out of the airport without being stopped. The next thing she knows, she's in the middle of nowhere in the Australian desert with the man who captured her, Ty. As the story goes on, Ty slowly reveals that he has been watching Gemma since she was 10. He truly believes that by kidnapping her, he is rescuing her from her disinterested parents and the boy who has taken an unhealthy interest in her. Ty wants to keep her with him so she's safe, and he thinks that eventually she will grow to love both the desert and him. After Gemma tries to escape and almost dies in the process, Ty finally agrees that if nothing has changed in four months, he will take her back to civilization. Not long after this, Gemma is bitten by a snake, and Ty's treatments are ineffective. So, desperate, he drives her to civilization and turns himself in at the hospital so that Gemma can get treatment. After Gemma recovers, her parents and the general public pressure her to tell them how much of a monster Ty was, but Gemma finds herself missing Ty and thinking that maybe he wasn't as bad as she first thought. The take on love that Christopher's book showed is incredibly unique. First of all, Ty was abandoned by both parents at a fairly young age, and shortly thereafter, he latched onto Gemma because he identified with her. He followed her for six years, watching over her, protecting her. At one point, Ty tackled and beat up a boy who was chasing Gemma through the woods. Ty's devotion to Gemma is formed from childhood abandonment and leads him to wholeheartedly believe that she will be better off with him, and that she will grow to love him. Additionally, Gemma's attitude toward Ty at the end of the book is fascinating. She holds onto a ring he gave her even while police are pressuring her to give a statement against him. A therapist speaks to her about Stockholm Syndrome, and encourages her to write out her experience and her thoughts throughout the entire thing, so in the last few pages, Gemma reveals that this was her impetus to write this entire story. After finishing, she looks back on all of it, and reconciles her feelings for Ty with his actions. She realizes that what he did was wrong, but she is determined to tell the courts that he is not a bad person, that he treated her well, and that he deserves to be treated fairly. What this story shows is how love can be twisted and stretched until it cannot be recognized. Is it still love? Is that how it ought to be defined?
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New book that's an absolutely must-read: Nancy Garden's Endgame. I don't know if you've heard of it, but if you haven't done it yet, pick it up and read it today! I have to warn you though, it's difficult to get through.
From the back cover, it becomes apparent before the book is even opened that the main character, fourteen-year-old Gray Wilton, is in serious trouble. He's been harassed and bullied and intimidated within an inch of losing his life. As the book goes on, the incidents keep piling up. The varsity football team corners Gray and his only friend on a regular basis, calling them derogatory names, shoving them around, getting increasingly more aggressive. Gray feels there is no one he can turn to, and even the reader has to agree. His father is angry, demanding, and unwilling to listen, and his mother is too weak to stand up to his father. His teachers either see nothing or pretend to see nothing. Gray is already an angry teen, and as things keep getting worse, so does Gray. He's backed into a corner. So, one day, he brings a gun to school. There are several things that make this book remarkable. First of all, even from the beginning, the reader knows that Gray is in jail, and it's strongly implied that he has killed some of his fellow students. Usually knowing this would turn us against the character. However, the way Garden writes makes us sympathize and even identify with Gray. As I was reading, I felt just as boxed in as Gray did. He had so few bright spots left in his life that even I couldn't find any. He's clearly a boy who needs some counseling and therapy, but first and foremost he's a boy who needs a friend. I genuinely felt for him; I was emotionally affected by his situation. In fact, Garden's writing was so powerful that it made me vow never to allow one of my future students to face such an issue alone. Bullying is still a real issue facing teens today. Physical, verbal, social, and cyber abuse happen on a regular basis, and Endgame brings this issue to life. Anyone who is either currently working with students or plans to work with them in the future should read this book. I promise you that you will never again look away when someone is "just getting teased a little." Reading this book is the first step toward ending bullying and protecting kids everywhere. I'm pretty sure that at some point or another, everyone has had to read Hamlet at some point or another. The storyline is familiar, at least. Prince Hamlet of Denmark is visited from the World Beyond by the ghost of his father, who demands vengeance. As Hamlet's father tells him, he was murdered by Claudius, his own brother. Shortly thereafter, Claudius took the throne (and the queen). This revelation begins the play, and it also begins Hamlet's slow descent into madness as he pursues revenge further and further, leaving his love, Ophelia, by the wayside. In fact, he tells her to go to a nunnery, and this rejection leads to her apparent suicide by drowning. However, authoress Lisa Klein decided to take poor Ophelia and push her from the margins of the story to its center. In Klein's novel, Ophelia, Ophelia tells the story from her point of view. She and Hamlet practically grew up together, and she impressed him with her wit and wisdom. They fell in love. Before Hamlet's madness began, Ophelia and Hamlet were secretly wed against the wishes of almost everyone. However, their idyllic bliss is shortly spoiled by the announcement the deceased king makes. Ophelia has a front-row seat to Hamlet's downward spiral, and ultimately must fake her own death (with the help of Hamlet's best friend, Horatio) to escape the wrath Hamlet's "play within a play" has enflamed in Claudius. Hamlet (in his madness) has openly rejected her, and Ophelia has nowhere left to go but to a convent. She takes a sleeping draught that makes her appear to be dead, then escapes disguised as a boy after Horatio frees her from the tomb in which she was laid. Ophelia gives birth to a son Hamlet never knew he had, and spends the rest of the story in the convent, working as a healer and physician for the sisters. While I applaud the decision to take a minor female character and put her in the center of the story, I think Klein might have been overly ambitious in her choice. Hamlet is so well known and so widely studied that it is difficult to reimagine it from a different standpoint. Also, since so much of the play's action follows Hamlet without Ophelia present, Klein had to create a lot of the story on her own. The storyline was good, and it certainly fit in with the original, but it still seemed like a bit of a stretch. However, it was definitely good to see what happened to Ophelia when the play left her for dead. Klein painted Ophelia as a strong, independent woman who just happened to receive a poor end of the deal. The subject matter was tough to reconcile with the original, Klein still told a wonderful story. |
AngelicaLaughter and literature are two of my favorite things, and I consider them to be crucial parts of my life. This blog is designed to spread life, laughter, and literature to anyone and everyone who needs them most. Photo by Tim Geers
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