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.

The Associate by John Grisham

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Another Young Lawyer Is Served Up for Breakfast

By JANET MASLIN

Published: January 25, 2009

John Grisham kick-starts his latest morality fable just as he has kick-started so many others: by introducing the warring forces of good and evil. On the side of the angels: Kyle McAvoy, idealistic editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal. As “The Associate” begins, Kyle is coaching a basketball team for underprivileged kids in New Haven as he waits to graduate and pursue his career of choice. He has accepted a $32,000-a-year legal aid job so he can help migrant workers in Virginia.

But there is a sinister stranger with a “slick head” and “calm hairy hands” in Kyle’s future. He shows up to broach a different career plan. This vaguely foreign-sounding man, calling himself Bennie Wright and aided by a team of fake F.B.I. agents, announces that he would like Kyle to become a $200,000-a-year associate for a high-powered New York law firm. Translated from the Grisham-ese, what that means is that Bennie — acting on the same kinds of murky but all-powerful motives that used to fuel Hitchcock plots as he sets up a corporate espionage scheme with Kyle as its patsy — would like Kyle to sell his soul to the devil.

Kyle is a brash, attractive good guy. (Think back to “The Firm.” Mr. Grisham has.) Why would he agree to an about-face like that? Because he has to. Quicker than you can say, “Duke lacrosse team,” Bennie brings up an ugly college episode that involved Kyle, his Duquesne University fraternity brothers and a woman named Elaine who now claims to have been raped by four of them at a party. Bennie has a cell-phone video record of the incident that is remarkably clear, even though all participants were too drunk to remember whether the sex was consensual.

Thus propelled, Kyle goes off to a place where he will suffer mightily so that Mr. Grisham can have a field day. Kyle enters the greedy, brutalizing world of Scully & Pershing, said to be the world’s largest law firm. This place chews up and spits out smart young rookies from America’s top law schools, and Mr. Grisham gives himself yet another chance to deplore that process.

With the help of a well-used cookie cutter he delivers one more hard-charging book about the hellish demands of corporate law. “I want to be a partner so I can sleep until 5:00 A.M. every day until I die at 50,” Kyle says bitterly, once he sizes up his new Scully & Pershing career.

Must a lawyer’s life be this way? Do you even have to ask? Kyle’s father has a small-town practice in Pennsylvania. “He worked very hard and treated everyone fairly,” the book says of him. “Clients were free to call him at home, and he would meet them on Sunday afternoons if necessary.” As for income, “fees were sometimes delivered in the form of firewood, eggs and poultry, steaks and free labor around the house.”

Soapbox fiction can be stupefying. But Mr. Grisham owes a very long winning streak to his stealth gift for making preachiness thrilling. Most recently, in “The Appeal,” he examined the corrupt process of rigging an election and concocted one of his best stories in recent memory. This time, returning to safer and more familiar territory, he dissects an amoral corporate culture, decries blind ambition and manages to use alcoholism, often the laziest aspect of crime stories, as an element of dramatic suspense. Though Kyle has been sober since college, he now finds himself stuck in an expense-account world where the second bottle of wine at a two-person lunch is supposed to be a perk, not a problem.

Mr. Grisham so often writes similar books that the same things must be said of them. “The Associate” is true to form: it grabs the reader quickly, becomes impossible to put down, stays that way through most of its story, and then escalates into plotting so crazily far-fetched that it defies resolution. Kyle McAvoy is another of the two-dimensional yet terrifically likeable heroes who come to life on Mr. Grisham’s pages only to evaporate later.

It’s easy to predict what choice Kyle will make at the end of the novel. It’s impossible to imagine, let alone care, what his life will be like once the improbably wild furor surrounding this one lone law-firm recruit is over.

Every now and then Mr. Grisham comes up with a lemon. “The Broker,” the touristy international thriller that existed primarily an excuse for its author to research the picturesque cafes of Italy, was one of those. “The Associate” is much better, even if it’s something of a retread.

Filled with individual episodes that are more memorable than its overall plot, it describes astonishing wastes of Kyle’s $400-an-hour time, for example when he bills $800 for driving a law partner’s car (actually his wife’s car) around blocks in Lower Manhattan because he can’t find a parking space near the Federal Courthouse. It also powerfully captures the cynicism with which Scully & Pershing’s new associates are whipsawed into utter servility while being persuaded that they are poised to become part of New York’s power elite.

Mr. Grisham fuses Kyle’s college and job experiences with something more skillful than simple cross-cutting. He brings back the old buddies who were part of an embarrassing past and allows them to nerve-rackingly jeopardize Kyle’s future. And although Mr. Grisham surrounds good-guy Kyle with spies, thugs and other calm hairy-handed menaces, “The Associate” never forgets who is this new lawyer’s worst enemy. It’s his old self.

I agree with Maslin's opinions of book in that it was addictive to read and we incorporated the consumption of alcohol very well into the book. After getting drunk often in college, Kyle decided to quit drinking altogether to avoid anymore drunk incidents. But when Kyle takes on the job as law associate for Scully & Pershing he needs that cup of wine to relax after an eighteen hour workday. However, one of Kyle's college buddies, Joe Baxtar, has abused the drug: Grisham uses a few chapters to show his struggles at rehab centers on account of his uncle forcing him to enter. Illustrating Baxtar's struggles allows the reader to see that Kyle is not the only one accused of rape that is struggling to fit in with society. Kyle also has a very deep connection with his father which emerged during his childhood years because he helped with his father's firm every day. Kyle did not tell his father about the rape charge when it first came up. Since Kyle didn't tell his father, he must have not thought much about the accusation and felt it could be avoided. Kyle's relationship with John McAvoy mends at last with the partnership of McAvoy & McAvoy law opperating in the town of York, Pennsylvania where Kyle grew up with his father.

The Accidental Mother by Rowan Coleman

Family and friends are more important than money, occupations, and love interests. This statement that should be obvious to all that are close to family and friends, is explored in Coleman's novel. Sophie, a middle aged woman living in London, is forced to take a break from her well paying, life shadowing job when her childhood best friend dies and her kids are without a legal guardian. Sophie thinks that taking care of two little girls is going to wreck her life, and is therefore determined to find Bella and Izzy's father who abandoned the family right before Izzy was born. The kids wreck her couch, prevent her from working on many parties, and put a sharp knife into a relationship with a client. When the girls' father, Louis, is found by a private detective found by Sophie, she has become attahced to the girls like they are her own. Sophie does not want to leave them. When the kids have gotten used to their father, Sohpie leaves, and after working for three months and receiving a promotion nothing feels right for her. Sophie realizes that the kids, and their father who loves Sophie, are who she really wants to spend their time with. I loved this book because the reader observes Bella and Izzy mature. Izzy refuses to take off her fairy dress, while Bella acts like an ignornat snob when forced to go to the zoo with Louis at the beginning of the book. However, by the end the family is close-knit and with Sophie and Louis's help the girls grow up and realize both guardians are there for them whenever, forever, whatever.

THe Accidental Mother almost 1/3 of it

The Accidental Mother

Rowan Coleman

Quarter 2

In this book the main character, Sophie, works at a major party planning corporation in London, and has dedicated her whole life to her job--almost too much of it. Suddenly she finds out that her childhood best friend has died and she has to take care of her children, a decision she made half drunk almost 10 years earlier. I would love to tell Sophie that even though her life is changing by the second, with everything mistake the kids make or decisions she makes, to take it easy. Sophie knows that her job is in jeopardy before the children's father is found and she can work, every day, for the whole day, again. Sophie should realize that children of a close friend are more important than getting a promotion or making a lot of money. Sophie must realize that taking care of kids is not that easy, so having a man, Jake Flyn, who likes her, aid her with the kids might not be a bad thing. If Carrie's husband is not found, a huge liability is placed on Sophie and she should not make a bad impression on the kids.

The Year of the Flood Whole Book

The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood

Last Entry for the book

Quarter 1

The book was a great way of explaining how the human race and how science can make humans sympathetic, and animal-like. The gardeners learn how to survive on an earth filled with stealers, and greedy people. When a waterless flood sweeps over the human race, some Gardeners manage to survive along with Crake’s “splice people.” These humans that act like animals by surviving in while talking to each other and sharing their feelings, are evaluated and explained in the book’s prequel. Religion is weaved into the book as well, because the Gardener’s name their important leaders after Adam and Eve in the bible. Also every day, for them, is dedicated to saint and a poem from a hymnbook is read about that specific day and the workings behind it. I happened to love the book because it portrayed the world in a way normal people do not think of it. At the beginning it started with two Gardeners alone, thinking they were last living humans after the waterless flood. The chapters alternate between the two women narrating. The women then take the reader back explaining important events in their lives. Finally the stories meet when the flashbacks end and they meet each other after the waterless flood.