Journal Three by Daryn Stiers

My active reading so far is going pretty well. I am doing well with highlighting and vocabulary. However, I'm still struggling writing notes in the margin and looking up the background information on what I read. I never annotated in high school, so it is a big change for me.

The strengths in the book, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah are the flow of the book. He is very good at describing what is going on around him and how he is feeling. Although, sometimes this is a weakness for him. Beah occasionally drags the scenes on. So far, that is one of the only weaknesses I've discovered. Unlike Beah, Sandra Cisneros' book The House on Mango Street, has different strengths and weaknesses. Cisneros strength is being creative in her writing. One of her weaknesses to me is some of the stories seem pointless. I don't always understand all of her stories. I prefer A Long Way Gone because I can picture it more. There are more descriptions in the book, so I can see the scenes in my mind more vividly.

In chapter seven one theme that stood out to me is survival. This is an important theme to understand because it shows us how determined Beah is. It gives us an insight to who he is so we can understand him more. He was even willing to leave the only person he knew so he could stay alive. In the book Beah stated, " I became frustrated with living in fear. I felt as if I was always waiting for death to come to me, so I decided to go somewhere where at least there was some peace. Kaloko was afraid to leave. He thought that by leaving the bush we would be walking towards death. He decided to stay in the swamp" (Beah 46). He was choosing to leave because he knew the rebels would get to them at some point, so he took the smart way out by leaving.