If I Stay By Gayle Forman

Throughout history there has been 450 school shootings in America. Since 1840, there has only been eight school shootings in Alabama. The book I read was about a school shooting in Alabama, in a small high town called Opportunity. This book was called, This Is Where It Ends. Marieke Nijkamp is the author of this book, and published it January 5th, 2016.

The piece is classified as Aboriginal Australian literature. It was published in the 1960’s. The purpose of the text is to give hope in a new beginning after the events involving the racial tension between the Aboriginals and the white settlers. The poem is directed to the Aboriginal people of Australia who suffered from these events

'Keeper N Me ' by Richard Wagamese, is a novel based on the necessary balance between life and the culture in which one belongs to. This is a necessary aspect in order to maintain a steady relationship with one 's self. In this novel passing on traditions or a certain way of life from generation to generation is one of the most important aspects of guiding someone of the Ojibway culture, as the Ojibway people have very strong beliefs and take their culture very seriously. The people of the Ojibway culture believe that through storytelling and dreams one can realize the importance of tradition and its influence on their identity. Wagamese throughout his novel tries to teach the readers the power of one 's community and traditions as he

The short story “The Love Of My Life” by T.C. Boyle's examines two couples who are imagined to be inseparable and how no love comes closer to theirs. The story follows young high school couples who are in the merge of a bright future. They are always together “wearing each other like a pair socks”. They idolized the love they share is something far from real and it is true love. While Jeremy is set to attend Brown and on the other hand China were in Binghamton things took wrong turn. Over the summer before their going to college they mistakenly conceived a baby while they are at a camping trip. The story was pleasant and everything was green and China and Jeremy went to a trip together and had sex. The couples were so keen to avoid this from

“April Morning” by Howard Fast is a novel that takes place during the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. The entire book takes place during a 24 hour time period. Adam Cooper is the antagonist in this novel. When Adam goes to bed on the eve of April 18, 1775 he is a boy. When he awakens the next morning he is forced to become a man. In the early hours of the morning he, along with the rest of the town, is awakened by a lone rider racing to Lexington to warn them that a British army, of maybe a thousand men, is marching their way. Immediately the town is in a frenzy to prepare for the British arrival. The book is about Adam’s journey during the Battle of Lexington.

Michael Gow's play, "Away" expresses the idea of going through changes and receiving help from people around you. The key characters of the play experiences change and renewal as a result of their relationships with others ad the summer vacation. Coral and Gwen is two characters that undergo the most changes throughout the trip. Coral manage to moved on from her's son death while Gwen changed from a snobby person to a person who is more understandable. Tom is one of the critical character that help Coral and Gwen realised their issues and surpasses it. The play showed lives of people and their own struggle during the 60s and how they overcome it.

Jamie Fader’s book Falling Back which was published in 2013, is based on ethnographic research over three years, from 2004 to 2007, of black and latino males on the edge of adulthood and that were incarcerated at the Mountain Ridge Academy reform school located in a rural area: “within a dense forest in western Pennsylvania, is Mountian Ridge Academy … ninety-acre campus contains eight dormitories, each of which houses thirty-two young men between ages 14 to 18” (p.1). The criminal thinking approach was intended to help young people identify the patterns that had led them to delinquency and replace it with corrective and prosocial thoughts. These young boys had been involved in drug offenses and violence within their suburban communities and were now in the process of behavioral change in order to help them reflect and be able to make better decisions which would lead them to a better life.

Girl Interrupted is Susanna Kaysen 's memoir a series of recollections and reflections of her nearly two year stay at a residential psychiatric program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She looks back on it with a sense of surprise. In her memoir she considers how she ended up at McLean, and whether or not she truly belonged there. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of her experience. Founded in the late 19th century, McLean Hospital had been a facility for troubled members of wealthy and aristocratic families. By the late 1960s, however, McLean had fallen into a period neglect. This was a time of great change in the mental health care field. Kaysen grew up in a wealthy and prestigious family. Like most teenagers, she was rebellious at times, confused and unsure about her future. She didn’t want to go to college and slept with her high school English teacher. She witnessed firsthand the widening generation gap that was developing in the late 1960s. Older generations looked at Kaysen’s generation 's world with alarm.

Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The real question of life after death isn 't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.” The idea that death is inevitable is well known by everyone, yet no one is certain as to what happens afterwards. Even though the subject of life after death has been argued for centuries by many philosophers and theologians. In the article Sign Here If You Exist, Jill Sisson Quinn adequately employs figurative language, rhetoric questionings, and personal anecdotes to demonstrate a controversial argument on the topic of life after death.

I also think Mia moved on to be very famous, because of her amazing talent on the cello. Overall, I think despite all the sadness Mia got her happy ending after

Holding Onto the Air an autobiography by Suzanne Farrell takes the reader backstage in the dramatic life of the world-renowned Balanchine ballerina. From her childhood in Cincinnati to her retirement from ballet in 1989, Farrell's story is truly a remarkable one. The book describes at length her time with the New York City Ballet as well as her complex relationship with the legendary Balanchine. Although Mrs. Farrell goes a bit too far into the ballet descriptions, her beautiful imagery allows reader to experience the joy of performing on stage.

The novel Never Let Me Go, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, is set in a capitalistic, dystopian society in which scientific advancements have greatly relieved society of their medical concerns, all the while, severely damaged their integrity. The exploitation of human clones for the sole purpose of implementing a sufficient number of organs for society has resulted in a change in their ethics, as well as their ego. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro uses characters to illuminate corruption in society, illustrating that greed in the pursuit of progress can negatively alter the mindset of society. By living in a capitalistic environment, one will develop a fatalist mentality in an attempt to come to terms with society and their

Rebecca Stead is fame as an American writer of fiction for children and teens. The achievement of her novels is not doubtful. She was born on January 16, 1968 and raised in New York City. Vassar College was the institution where she acquired her bachelor’s degree in 1989. Moreover, she has started to write since she was a child but she altered her career to become a lawyer. However, Stead started to become of writing subsequent to the birth of her two children. Her inspiration of writing children’s novel was from her son and her collections of story stories on her laptop. One day, her 4-year-old son by chance pushed her laptop out off the dining-room table and destroyed her piece of writing. Stead was very angry with her son and she went to the bookstore to find books which can inspire her to write. From that moment, her motivation and loving in writing began to boost up, and her debut novel was First Light which won The New York Best Times. Due to her great spirit in writing, she won The American Newbery Medal in 2010, Winner of the Boston Globe –Horn Book Award for Fiction, IRA Children’s Book Award for Young Adult Fiction, A Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner and A National Parenting Publications Gold Award for her second novel, When You Reach Me, followed by achieving Guardian Prize in 2013 as the first winner for her third novel, Liar & Spy.

This year in my English class three books I read were the best books I have ever read. I could connect to these books well and they taught me valuable lessons. The three books that stood out to me were If I Stay, It’s Kind of a Funny Story and They Both Die at the End. These books had a theme that connected all of them. The theme that spreads across these books are life does not last forever, hold it close, we must work through it and live it to the fullest.

I read a lot of books and most of them are fiction. But some of them are about things that could actually happen in real life, as in If I Stay by Gayle Forman. Mia, the protagonist, is stuck between life and death when she gets into a car accident. The things I like most about her is that as she struggles with her decision to stay alive, or die, she looks back on all the good times she had and now as she’s in the hospital, cherishes what she has more than she had before. Her struggle to stay is a battle between good and evil and she doesn’t know what side to choose. One thing I don’t like however is that she kind of makes the struggle look easy. I feel like she plays it off a little. Her life is in danger and she thinks she can get back