Testimony Quarter 3...1st book

Testimony

Anita Shreve

Quarter 3

The reputation of a prestigious high school in Vermont, along with the town it’s in and many people living in it are affected drastically after one event depicted in this book. Three boys on the basketball team at Avery Academy (which is just getting better after recruiting a few boys) decide to blow off some steam by pulling a freshman from a school dance into one of their dorm rooms. As the night progresses, the boys who are very drunk, do not realize the state and federal law they have broken by sleeping with a girl who is 4 or 5 years younger than them. The actions taken during this one night affect the boys’ future and many others. One boy, Silas, was in a relationship with a compassionate violinist and his family was well respected in the town, owning a productive farm. Another was accepted, early decision, to Brown University. The girl was so scared she changed her name and moved across the country. The lesson that you can take away from this book is to always think ahead. Of course you need to live in the moment but our judgment and decision-making skills are there for a reason. Not only were the boys’ lives affected but those of their parents, school instructors, and friends.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road explores the outcome of an almost barren world with next to no people living and food to be eaten. A little boy travels with his caring, smart, and resourceful father. They wheel a cart with bare necessities (food, fire, blankets, a tarp, and water) down a long road until they reach the coast stopping at night and various other times when they are exhausted. There are a few themes explored in this book including father-son relationships, trust, not giving up, and acts of sympathy. The boy develops a relationship with his father in which he adheres to all orders given to him and is scared to share dreams with him. The circumstances change their relationship--the boy in forced to trust his father because he has nothing else to believe in. The duo never gives up on their journey. Even with little sustenance they continue traveling and they find more food whether it is in the basement of an abandoned house, or a ship stuck in the ocean near the coast. When the father and son pass by a weak man that they both realize will die, the boy wants his father to give him food even though they need that food too. This act of kindness pays off because at the end of the book, when the father dies, the boy is taken in by another family of a mother, father, and two kids who will feed and look after him.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

This classic had a fairly slow plot, but I enjoyed reading about the relationship between two men, Lennie and George, as they traveled from farm to farm in California getting jobs. The book explores friendship and loneliness through the interactions of the men and actions done on their own. George agrees to travel with a man like Lennie who is forgetful, and hard to look after because he has almost no common sense. George fears being lonely, traveling around himself like all of the other men on the farm who find it interesting that George and Lennie agreed to stay together. Lennie had an incident at one of the farms the two worked at, he refused to let go of a woman’s dress and she started screaming out of fear Lennie would do something else. At the farm focused on in the book Lennie does something similar, but doesn’t want the woman to start screaming so he covers her mouth and winds up killing her. George does not want to be associated with a possible murderer so he finds Lennie in the place he told his friend to hide and shoots him after they reminisce about a farm they want to own. Now George wants to be alone, while Lennie prefers to be with a friend or pet a soft animal. Lennie wants to find comfort in soft material objects, or taking that as a symbol he wants to lead a quiet, but calm life.