Quick Reviews: 'The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian' and 'Digger J. Jones'

Hello my blogger friends! I wanted to write reviews for the books I studied in my children's literature class this week. We're starting to move into the teen and young adult areas of literature now and I really enjoyed the books. I'm going to make these two reviews short today because I have to catch a train back to my hometown soon, so here are my quick reviews for Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Richard J. Frankland's Digger J. Jones. Summaries courtesy of Goodreads.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie 

In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney, that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. (Goodreads)

Favourite character: The protagonist, Junior/Arnold.

Favourite part of the plot: *spoiler alert* At the very end when Junior and Rowdy start hanging out again.

Setting: The two main settings of the book were the Spokane Indian reservation and the town of Reardan.

Style: Told from Junior/Arnold's point of view in the first person. We get a very honest retelling of his thoughts and feelings throughout the book in a simple language that is easy to understand and for the target audience (teens) to relate to.

Originality: The fact that Junior/Arnold was a very well rounded character was wonderful. A lot of stories only focus on overcoming the setbacks created by one aspect of the self, while this book looked at a character who had to battle against the negatives and stereotypes of many aspects of himself. For instance, while I was expect this book to be about a Native American boy fighting against white supremacy to make something of himself, the book was also about a boy fighting poverty, and a boy living with disability, all within the same character.

Digger J. Jones by Richard J. Frankland

Digger is keeping a diary about the things that matter to him: piffing yonnies at the meatworks, fishing with his cousins, and brawling with the school bully. But it's 1967, and bigger things keep getting in the way. Digger is finding out who he is, what he believes, and what's worth fighting for. (Goodreads)

Favourite character: The protagonist, Digger.

Favourite part of the plot: *spoiler alert* I can't decide between when Digger, Darcy, and Stevie all start reading poetry or every scene between Digger and Tom (but especially the one where Tom calls him 'djaambi,' which means 'brother').

Setting: South Yarra in Melbourne, and Condah where Lake Condah Mission used to be, on Gunditijimara land. It's all in Australia, anyway.

Style: The whole book is written in diary-entry form, including dates at the start of each new section, and occasionally an indication of what time of the day it is. This lets us get a very close look at the inner workings of the main character's life.

Originality: It's nice to see a book about supporting the indigenous people of Australia that actually has a happy ending. I've never read a book that's from the point of  view of an Aboriginal character before (or a half-caste, in this case).


Have you read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian or Digger J. Jones? What have you been reading? 

- Bonnee.

Review: 'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel

Over the mid-year uni break, I started reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I'd seen the movie in cinemas with a friend, back in the summer, and I'd wanted to read the book ever since. I am still a firm believer that, at least in most cases, the book is better than the movie. Although Ang Lee did a marvelous job directing the motion picture and the visuals were truly spectacular, Yann Martel wrote this story with equal beauty, and without adding unnecessary Hollywood subplots.

Life of Pi follows the journey of a young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel, known to all as Pi, as he searches for new ways to show his faith in God by practicing multiple religions, and as he maintains his faith through a terrifying, life-changing ordeal: the sinking of the cargo ship that was transporting his family from India to Canada, of which he is the sole survivor, stranded in the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a fully grown male Bengal tiger for 227 days.

When I started reading the book, I thought the beginning was slow and at some points a little boring. However, most of it was necessary in order to understand Pi's faith in God, which was essentially what stopped him from losing hope during the ordeal. Growing up, Pi is the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry and he knows plenty about the animals his father kept, including the dangers of Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger who had been brought to them as a cub and grown in captivity. When his family's voyage to Canada begins, the animals are loaded onto the Japanese cargo ship under sedatives. One night, while they sail across the Pacific, the cargo ship sudden sinks and Pi is left stranded on a lifeboat with a handful of animals, who all eventually die, except for Richard Parker, the fully grown male Bengal tiger. Despite Pi's fear of drowning, dying of malnutrition, and becoming Richard Parker's next meal, he has a strange determination to survive the ordeal, which is propelled both by his fears and by his faith in God. For 227 days, Pi manages to survive, literally in the same boat as Richard Parker, until they eventually wash ashore.

One of the things I really came to like about this book was that the ending wasn't a complete happily ever after. Pi suffered through an awful experience and somehow came out alive, but alone. In the end, even after 227 days at sea together, Richard Parker abandons him as soon as they find land. But Pi has learned a great many things about himself, about life, about his capacity for faith, and about willpower. Pi was forced to do things he would never have considered doing before the ordeal and had to improvise ways to practice his faith, in order to both stay alive and keep himself from despair. He was lucky in one of the most unlucky and unlikely ways and left with only his own life, which he had to rebuild alone. Yann Martel illustrated an inspiring determination and will to survive, the strength of human instinct, faith, and our ability to learn through experience.

I've now read 5/24 books for my 2013 Reading Challenge on Goodreads. I'm a little behind, but I know I can make up for it once classes are over for the year.

Have you read Life of Pi, or seen the movie? Have you ever been stranded in a lifeboat with a tiger? What else have you been reading?

- Bonnee.

Writer's Update / Writing Craft: Memory and Incident

On the left are the two original stories
that I should be giving more attention to,
while on the right are two fanfiction I wasted
precious time on this week.

Don't you hate it when one day you have a great idea for a story, but you just can't seem to get it out sounding the way you want it and it takes you a whole day with lots of interruption to write a measly couple of thousand words? And then the next day you come up with a not-as-great idea, but still okay, and you manage to pump out almost 6000 words in little more than four uninterrupted hours... Yeah, that happened to me. To put the cherry on top of my disappointment, they were both only fanfictions. Why couldn't it have been some good original work instead?! In other writerly news, no progress has been made to the revisions of KATHERINE in over a month now, I haven't touched my W.I.P WALLS in even longer and I am two books behind on my Goodreads challenges of 24 books read in the year. How are all your goals and revisions and W.I.Ps going?

I'm just about up-to-date as far as sharing my lecture-notes with you all goes. This is what we covered in Writing Craft, week 3:

Memory and Incident

Readings for this week were The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (pages 288-314), The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (pages 13-26) and The Sea by John Banville (pages 3-17).

How do we incorporate isolated examples of observation into what we write? This leads on from the previous lesson about observation and accuracy. The thing is, once something is no longer before us, it is a memory. A common problem with writing about something after-the-fact is that we might write about it too generally.

But imagination is possible because we have a wealth of memories to draw upon and to transform. Just because we are writing from a memory, does not mean we have to be 100% true to that memory. Unless we are being asked to write an autobiography, a memory can be nothing more than the seed of something much, much bigger. Telling a story is a creative process and this is also true when the story we are telling is a memory. Like a game of Chinese whispers: you see something happen and you tell somebody about it later. To make the story seem worth telling, you might unintentionally talk it up or exaggerate, or maybe you really do think it was more story-worthy than what it really was. Either way, say your audience decides to tell somebody else; they're going to tell it differently, using their own interpretation of the event, which might not be 100% accurate to the story you told them, but it is what they remember and it is what comes out through the creative process of retelling a story.

So how do we use memories when we write? We discussed three different ways in our lecture:

1. Using our memories as part of the writer's craft, to add a certain detail to our story: our protagonist is wearing the same sweater as the girl we saw getting off the tram earlier the same day, because that sweater really caught your eye and you remember it and you want your character to have it too.

2. Writers can draw on memory in a broader way, using episodes, settings, atmospheres and situations that can be reworked into our writing. You saw the girl with the sweater trying not to drop her bags while she extracted her mobile phone from her pocket and you decided to get your protagonist to have a similar moment walking home with the groceries.

3. The most direct way of using memory in our writing is to use a memory as a 'performance' in the text, as in when the protagonist retells an event that happened in their childhood.

My second assignment for Writing Craft is using memory as the seed for a fictional story. I've already written a first-draft of this and my tutorial group workshopped it (everyone has to workshop one of their assignments in a tutorial). I'm glad to say I received a lot of positive feedback and my tutor was happy with the way the group as a whole handled the workshop setting.

Have you used memory in one of these ways when writing a story? 

- Bonnee.

Reading and Writing Goals, 2013

I know it's over a month since everyone was supposed to set their New Years resolutions, but I was wondering who out there had a goal they wanted to reach this year in the department of reading and/or writing?

Due to my university course, I'm probably going to write a LOT! The fact that I'm studying writing is definitely a good thing. Coursework aside, I want to finish my current W.I.P, 'WALLS', re-add the scenes I cut from 'KATHERINE' and submit it to agents and/or more competitions. Towards the end of the year, I would also like to get back to 'EVERGREEN: A FALLEN STAR', as I believe I am already closer to having what I need to make it worth reading. But I'm going to let that last won sit until I've finished the year at uni first.

In terms of reading - for recreation, not for studying - I am aiming for at least two books every month. I've already knocked off four, so twenty more to go. Fingers crossed that I well and truly out-read my goal for the year, but here's a look at what I've read and what to read.

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
3. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
4. V for Vendetta, the graphic novel Alan Moore and David Lloyd
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Currently reading)
6. The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
7. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
9. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
10. City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare
11. City of Glass by Cassandra Clare
12. City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare
13. City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare
14. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
15. The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
16. The Host by Stephanie Meyer
17. The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephanie Meyer
18. Darkness, Be My Friend by John Marsden
19. Burning for Revenge by John Marsden
20. The Night is for Hunting by John Marsden
21. The Other Side of Dawn by John Marsden
22. The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
23. Inkspell by Cornelia Funke
24. Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke.

Well, that's my current list, though there's no guarantee I might not swap some of those books around. I need to read and finish a few series this year... And of course, I will be leaving a review for every book I read, both here and on Goodreads!

What's everybody else's reading and writing goals looking like? Please share!

- Bonnee.

Goodreads and Competition

A friend sent me a request to join Goodreads via Facebook, but I didn't want to do it via Facebook so I just joined up directly to the site. You can find me here. This link is also in the 'Find Me' tab. Feel free to shoot me a friend request!


My sincerest apologies to the people I follow via their blogs, as I have had very little time in the past week to read up on your latest posts. I promise to make an effort to catch up some time in the near future! It has been hectic here!


Competition! 
So just to stir up a bit of fun to make up for not being a very dedicated blogger in so long, in 100 words or less, describe something beautiful. This could be anything! A woman, a magnificent view of a beach, the sunset, the sky, an emotion, a dream, a place, a thing, anything that you think is beautiful!

Rules:
Competition closes in one week! (Tuesday, June 5th, 2012, at 5:00pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time)


One entry per person. No anonymous entries. Entrants must have an account that can be linked to via blogger when submitting a comment: e.g. the name you comment with can be clicked on a take me directly to your own online profile. Including a link in an anonymous post does not count.

I will post all of this competition's entries in the first blog-post after the closing date (by entering the competition, you agree to this automatically) and ask readers to vote for one entry. Voters may not vote for their own entry, and to help avoid cheating, no anonymous votes will be accepted.

No prizes sorry, just bragging rights and the enjoyment of writing.

Tell your friends. Have fun. Ready, set, GO!

- Bonnee.