Bad Boy: A Memoir

Bad Boy is a memoir about Walter Dean Myers that showed some very interesting ways of life for the times. A theme in this book is how the world was changing. He talked about how African Americans were starting to get more jobs and were progressing into sports. He talks of Jackie Robinson, who was the first African American to play in the major leagues. Times have changed so much since then. Another common thing to do back then according to Walter, was to receive beatings from parents. This really disturbed me when I read it because that must have had such an impact on the kids. Thank goodness things have changed regarding that. It was also disturbing to hear that if a child was bad in class, they would make them go sit in the closet. It was interesting to see through this memoir how so much has changed in daily life over just one person’s lifetime. Another theme in this book is gender roles. Walter talks about how he enjoys writing poem, reading books from the library, and he even found out that he likes to dance. He felt that he had to keep all of these things a secret or act like he did not enjoy them because they were not boy activities. This issue of gender roles still exists today in society and many boys and girls feel pressured to like certain things and act a particular way because of these gender roles. Other themes of this book include loss, race, bullying, escapes and financial struggles.

Bad Boy positions adolescents as having a hard time dealing with life. It positions them having dreams and realizing that they are not possible. I believe that a lot of adolescents have a very hard time dealing with difficult situations and begin to get depressed. Walter begins to feel very alone and most adolescents feel that way at some point or another. It also positions them beginning to understand how the world works. From personal experience, I know when I was an adolescents I began to learn that the world is not always fair and it is not always right. Walter learns about the struggles and horrific things African Americans had to go through and this weighs very heavily on him.

I would give this book a C because it was very interesting to see how different things were when Walter Dean Myers was growing up to how it is now. However, nothing really hooked me into reading this and it did not keep me interested. I found myself constantly checking my phone while reading it and I do not like feeling the need to distract myself while reading.  

Wintergirls

The biggest theme in the book Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson is the suffering caused by eating disorders. This book portrays the struggles people face with eating disorders perfectly. My opinion is that a Wintergirl is someone who is so frozen in thinking she has to be beautiful by societies standards, which is Barbie stick thin. Wintergirls are so obsessed with being a certain way that they are not essentially living life. Only when a wintergirl begins to thaw, she begins to actually live. Lia, who suffers from anorexia, undergoes change when she figures out that Cassie died from her eating disorder of bulimia. The fact that she can’t live like she has been with over exercising, self harm, and starvation becomes very real to Lia. This is very relatable to life because when a tragedy hits, that is what usually causes change in people. People who experience eating disorders do not usually understand that what they are doing to their bodies can end in death, but Anderson makes that very clear through Cassie’s death. Anderson gives a sense of hope to the reader through Lia when she nearly dies from overdosing on sleeping pills and her fight to stay alive. The recovery she then faces gives hope to the reader that you can recover from eating disorders. Another theme in this book is guilt, which was shone by Cassie calling for help and Lia ignoring it when she could have ended up saving her life. Guilt is hard for anyone to go through but Anderson portrays her getting over guilt really well. Lia’s own recovery helps her get over her guilt about ignoring Cassie’s calls. The only critique I have about this book is that it gives into the stereotype that only girls get eating disorders when in fact both genders can suffer from them. I think Anderson should have added a male into the mix somewhere.

Wintergirls positions adolescents as susceptible to society standards and pressures. It shows them distant from parents who are not aware of the situation their kids are in. It also positions adolescents as fragile, which is very true. This book would be an eye opener for anyone adolescent that is experiencing any type of eating disorder. It would also appeal to adolescents that is suffering by thinking they are not good enough. This text is very relatable for people who have ever had guilt over something.

Personally, I loved this book and would strongly recommend it to others. I think the text is very raw and real. I would give Wintergirls an A+ because it has the ability to change people’s lives. It gives the reader a sense of hope to overcome things that seem so impossible to ever recover from.

UNWIND

 This book is very controversial with the concept of being unwound as an alternative to abortion. I think that unwinding is cruel because it lets some kids live life and develop dreams and aspirations and have goals for life, to only have them shutdown and be unwound. On the other end, it makes some other kids withdrawal from life because there is the possibility of not having a life at all. This book has a very interesting twist on the pro-life concept. I feel that it would be crueler to let someone live to a certain point and then kill them, then to not let them live at all. The concept of storking is a horrible idea as well, interesting but horrible. The concept of playing ding dong ditch with a baby can be very screwed up. Storking can lead to horrible things like it did in the book when Connor watched the baby who was passed around the neighborhood die. The responsibility of a baby should not be put on a family simply because someone thought their doorstep looked good. It is almost as if storking counteracts the concept of unwinding. I would think the person would just care for the baby until it was thirteen and then have it unwound rather than just dumping the burden on someone else. In my opinion, the idea that a person will live on passed being unwound with his or her body parts in a bunch of other people is stupid. Being killed and then giving the body parts away doesn’t evolve to living at all, it evolves to being dead. To me, living is having full physical body with a consciousness to make personal decisions about life; one body part is not capable of doing this and it would be interesting to know what the government’s definition of life is.

This book would appeal to adolescents because if unwinding were a real thing, it would be around the time for those readers to be unwound. So therefore it would make adolescents think about what it would be like to have your life end at that age. It could make the story very real for a lot of readers and relatable. I also think it would be relatable to adolescents who do not want to face things and feel like running away.

I personally really enjoyed this book even though I am not into science fiction type novels. I would give this book an A- because the concept was so intriguing. Also, I loved how it was written from different perspectives and had overlapping scenes from those perspectives. I thought that was a very cool way to read a story.