JOURNAL THREE BY SHAE FITZPATRICK

My active reading is going good and I will keep up the good work for the rest of the year. My English teachers throughout high school taught me and my peers to always annotate and I have learned that I like to write in my books and it helps me relate to the story more and also helps me better understand what’s going on in the book. The one thing I struggled with was coming up with chapter names but I think that is a good idea and will try to get in the habit of it.

 I think that the chapters are very short in the House on mango street which is a weakness to me because there is more of a story in the chapters in the book A long way gone. The house on mango street has a lot of good metaphors and other ways that Sandra Cisneros brings your attention into her writings. In  A long way gone one of the weaknesses is that there are a lot of different things happening in the same chapters so it’s hard to remember what happens in each chapter. A strength that the book A long way gone has is that the chapters are very interesting and it is an actual story unlike the house on mango street. I like the look a long way gone a lot better it’s just more interesting to me than The house on mango street is. It’s also a lot less confusing. 

The theme that I saw occur in all of the chapters was losing hope. The boys in the story are doing everything to stay alive and will do anything to keep each other safe but they are losing hope and losing their connections which will make it hard for them to all survive in my opinion in the end. Since they are going through hard times together and seeing horrible things happen to the people in the community they should be sticking together and their relationships should be getting stronger but what is happening is the exact opposite. In chapter 5 Ishmael gets separated from his brother mentally and psychically. On page 34, chapter 5 before they had actually  gotten separated "it seemed as if our worlds were different now and our connection was breaking." This important part in the book shows that Ishmael is alone now and that having people to get through stuff which is needed and by this happening in chapter 5 Ishmael needs to gain his hope back. In the later chapters I hope he gets more faith back in finding junior and his family because he had lost it in these few chapters. This is important everyone needs hope in everything they do or they will not succeed.