The Characters In Monument 14 By Emmy Laybourne

In the fiction novel, “The Samurai's Garden” by Gail Tsukiyama, readers explore how a samurai slowly becomes recognized. Stephen, a 20-year-old boy is sent far away from his family to explore a completely new world away from the ongoing war. He lives with Matsu, the caretaker of the family property in Tarumi. Suffering from a terrible sickness, Matsu helps Stephen grow and get back a normal life. In a town named Yamaguchi, he develops friendships and grows appreciation to those with leprosy, especially Sachi, a beautiful young women and one of Matsu’s friend. He starts to love what he can call his new home and all the people around him. Is this all because of Matsu? Matsu might definitely be what one could call the real samurai of the novel because he shows traits of a strong samurai, both character and physical and owns a significant garden in which correlates to the title.

In the novel Legend by Marie Lu, there is one character in which I would be delighted to be my friend. Day is everything you ask for in a friend. He is an honest and humble person. Day has a charisma as well as a loving personality to him that makes his loved ones like to be around him. If there were two words to describe Day, it would be daring and caring. Day completes all of these stunts to annoy and anger the Republic. He gets hurt sometimes, like his three story fall out of the hospital, but always springs right back life. Day is a caring person because of his actions towards his family and dearest friends. In the book on page 6, Day shows that he cares for his family. “I dig through the little pile of goodies inside the bundle, then hold up a used pair of goggles. I check them again to make sure there are no cracks in the glass. ‘For John. An early birthday gift.’ My older brother turns nineteen later this week. He works fourteen-hour shifts in the neighborhood plants friction stores and always comes home rubbing his eyes from the smoke. These goggles were a lucky steal from a military supply shipment.” Even while Day is constantly living on the run and off of his steals, he still manages to take care of his family. John is the messenger that gives most of Days care packages to the family. No one else knows in which Day is still alive and that he is now the Republic’s most wanted criminal. While living on the streets with Tess as his only company, he still cares about

Everyone at one point has judged a book by its cover. In the short story, “Cathedral”, Raymond Carver creates a narrator who bases off ideas and assumptions about blind people from movies. The narrator has never interacted with a blind person before the day where his wife invites her friend, who is named Robert, to stay. The narrator and Robert have never met, but the narrator has a strong dislike towards Robert before meeting. The narrator’s closed-mindedness and misconceptions leads him to judge Robert, however after a few hours of interaction, the narrator learns more about him and grows to have a new perspective about people not being who they think they are.

The author, who put himself as narrator, describes how he walks through the halls of the university and approaches the upper school and its playground, and he seems to get so emotionally attached that he cannot take another turn. “I turned right so as not to

Carver is well known for his short stories and poetries. Among his works, “Cathedral” is considered one of the best, favorite, and most optimistic and the most developed. Carver’s story revolves around the theme of seeing and looking. Most people believed they could not live without cathedrals which brought them closer to their God. Similarly, people place so much importance to the physical eyesight and tend to think they can hardly live without it. Robert, a blind man, is invited to the narrator’s home and the narrator is shown troubled by Roberts’s disability. Later on, the narrator is amazed to see the blind smoking despite having even thought of helping him with his drink earlier on (Carver 516- 524). The latter brought to attention that as much as natural looking is essential, more essential is the ability to see or to visualize things. The writer explains that it might be tougher to be without eyesight; however, it is possible to live without it and make the best of what else one has, more so the brain. Visualizing brings out a better view of the significance of life and things surrounding us.

In this section, Jeannette Walls starts off, in the present time by telling the readers about her seeing her mom on the street, that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Jeannette uses emotional words like blustering and fretted to show that seeing her mom was an emotional time. Later in the section, she goes way back into her life to when she was three years old and when her family and her was living in the desert. She started off telling a story of when she was on fire. This story was intense, it was really dramatic on her parents part, her dad was screaming at her and the doctor a lot. Then she talked about when they moved to Las Vegas, her family lived in a motel room, which didn’t last long, they had to leave Vegas in a rush, because her dad was cheating in blackjack and the dealer found out. The last story in the section is where her family drove to San Francisco and stayed in another motel. One night her dad was at the bar, across the street. He left Jeannette and her three other siblings in the room. Jeannette got bored so she decided to play with fire and that let to a big disaster resulting in the whole hotel burning down.

One major theme in the book is coming of age. Both Alex and Dean are pushed into situations where they must make life or death decisions on the behalf of a group of children. This forces them to leave behind all of their childish notions of how the world should

“He [Jeannette’s father, Rex] will not keep me out of harm’s way, he will put me in harm’s way and I have to find a way to remove myself from the situation.” (Diversity Connection). I feel like this quote, from Jeannette, came t directly from the situation where Rex took her out to the bar to help him earn money for alcohol, but yet she still doesn’t see herself as a victim. Even though Jeannette Walls was the victim of sexual abuse at a very young age, she tries to recreate the freedom from her childhood into her adult life, But in her younger years where she has no occupational activities, no nurturing, no money and no friends to turn to, it proves to be very hard to maintain.

The novel Crossed by Ally Condie is the second of the trilogy. In this novel, there were various engaging characters incorporated into the plot. However, there was a character that I additionally favored compared to the others. This character is Indie. She was introduced in the commencement of the novel, specifically in chapter 2. Indie worked along with Cassia in the fields to plant crops so, the Enemy would believe there was civilization in that location. Usually, only Aberrations were transported to do that variation of labor, not Citizens like Cassia. Indie, from the beginning, was intrigued by Cassia and began observing her. For instance, she would watch and attempt to figure her out. When Cassia and Indie were about to be searched, Indie

Emmy Laybourne’s Monument 14, follows the main character Dean Greiber who is a junior in highschool living in the city of Monument, Colorado. Although the flow of the book is a little disconnected at times, the development of the major/minor characters was truly astounding throughout the book. The book starts out quite quickly with a weather phenomenon. The destructive hailstorm cause two buses to violently crash into each other with Dean and his brother on board. Immediately, the remaining students ranging from elementary school to highschool take refuge in a store with absolutely no adults to look after them. Not only did the hailstorm cause widespread destruction, it also disrupted a nuclear power plant causing extremely dangerous chemicals

The text is communicating in a way of humans not articulating who they are, what they are fearful of, or what they are hiding behind. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is conveying how his characters in the text do not want to see what is out in the real world. Also, he is communicating using something that everyone struggles with, finding who they are and what they are afraid of. The books are what they are afraid of not wanting to see what is out there, not wanting to find out the reality. Guy Montag was one of the few who wanted to seek pleasure and thought he could seek that from books. For this reason, reading made him comprehend that he was not happy, he did not love his wife, and he did not like what he was becoming. The firemen in the book were a group who would burn houses down that had books in them. Books were so prohibited that if someone had them in their custody their house would be burnt down along with their books. The real world is what everyone was focused on hiding from the books were a big part of that. Therefore, Ray Bradbury is telling his audience to come out to get out of a comfort zone.

Again in contrast to Debra Moore’s growth in discovering fame isn’t everything, Michael Deane, by the end of the book, is falling prey to fames temptation, involving himself far too much in Debra’s life saying that her life story is his story now and his right to produce. His assistant asks him if he’s going to apologize to Dee and her son for his past actions toward them but he instead says, “‘Apologize?’ Again, Michael doesn’t quite understand what she’s saying. ‘I came here for the story, For my story” (321). Michael Deane didn’t show any growth when it comes to personal development, in fact he

An American author and journalist Jeannette Walls once said, “When people kill themselves, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind”. This is certainly true of the characters in Susin Nielsen’s realistic fiction novel The Reluctant Journal Of Henry K. Larsen. In this novel, a young boy named Henry is trying to rebuild his life, after his older brother, Jesse, pulled the trigger in a murder/suicide, taking the life of one of his classmates with him. The actions and choices of the characters are reflected significantly in three notable themes: regret, tragedy, and fear. All of these themes entwine into each other and help us to understand the answers to a key question- what motivates

A trait that stands out in the book is the symptom of bodily memories. In Melinda’s case, during a frog dissection in her science class, she remembers the opening up and even says, “She doesn’t say a word. She is already dead. A scream starts in my gut – I can feel the cut, smell the dirt, feel the leaves in my hair.” (81). One of the other symptoms that Melinda has is self-harm. The first time that this is shown in the book, Melinda says this, “I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep?” (87). Melinda also has a hard time talking to her parents about the rape to which she says, “How can I talk to them about that night? How can I start?” (72). Some victims recover from such a traumatic experience, while others don’t and live a lifetime of depression and must undergo intense therapy. In Melinda’s case, she finds redemption by talking to her parents and the guidance counselor, and putting her faith into her teachers, friends, and her art project at school. Because rape can affect anybody anywhere, everyone should be aware of the circumstances, and how to deal with it.

Christopher Boone articulates The Curious Incident, however, this novel isn’t told by an average fifteen-year-old boy; Christopher has Asperger’s syndrome—this isn’t stated in the novel, but we can acquire this knowledge simply by reading Christopher’s words. People with Asperger’s tend to have difficulty with social interactions, and Christopher clearly displays this inability when trying to figure out the emotions on the paper that Siobhan draws for him (1), also when he states, “ I find people confusing” (17). Another aspect of Asperger’s syndrome is a fascination with letters and numbers, this aspect is clear in the labeling of the chapters with prime numbers, his tactic to calm him self down by doing math in his head and finally by his adamant need to take A-level math and eventually physics. Nevertheless, this uniqueness about Christopher creates an unexpected narrative twist on this murder mystery novel.