The Joy Luck Club

I finished reading this book for our speech and debate duo, and I thought it was a very good book. The whole story revolves around this idea of Asian parenting a Chinese-American child. The book contains many different vignettes about different children and how they are being treated by their mother and how they see things differently. One particular story that I liked was one that our skit was mainly on, and ironically, also read during English. It was called Two Kinds. This talked about a girl through her journey being born a Chinese-American. Jing-mei, talks about how she was expected to do so many things well as a child to reach her mothers expectations of  being a proud, modest, Chinese daughter. She began taking daily piano lessons from a teacher living in the same apartment. She then attended a piano talent show. There, she messed up pretty badly. It was thought that she brought shame to her mother. Thinking after she bombed her performance, she refused to play the piano again. After having a large fight with her mother, their relationship began to fall apart.
I thought throughout the book, the overall theme was that only those who work hard towards a goal, can become the person who they truly want to be. This is saying that with all the troubles you face through working, those troubles will be the key point in your success.
Jing-mei, the main character, had many characteristics. I believe that her best characteristic is that she can stand up for herself. She wants her mother to understand that she can't be the perfect daughter she wants her to be, so she fights for her reasoning. This I admire because I do not have the will to go against my parents when they want me to do something that I have no intention of doing. Jing-mei's worst characteristic is probably that she still does not put much effort into what she is doing. When playing the piano, she never corrected herself when playing the notes wrong. She dawdled during practices a lot and this is something that I do not like of Jing-mei. Overall, I give this book a 7.5 out of ten. This book does not have a lot of action, but it does contain important morals and has a very dramatic mood to it. If you like more serious, yet having humorous aspects of it, I would recommend this book. Sometimes, I found parts to be just dull and hard to understand because they are transferring between characters a lot.

The Fault In Our Stars

December 11, 2013

I read pages 1-30. This book was very popular among my friends. Many of them have recommended this book to me, so after reading the synopsis, I just had to read it. An average aged teenaged girl called Hazel has thyroid and lung cancer and is forced to attend a weekly support group. This support group is consisting of people who have recovered from cancer. Hazel hates going to these things with a very strong passion. There, she meets a boy called Augustus. 

Hazel and Augustus get along very well from the start. Augustus has osteosarcoma which is a type of bone cancer. Hazel hates everyone in the group but the reason Augustus and get got along so well was because their sense of humor was the same... and Hazel thought Augustus was very good looking. You could tell how much they meant to each other. It was in fact that The author created an.atmosphere that have me the feeling that their relationship was going to be very bumpy.


About the Author

John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, is a writer and critic. He has won many awards for this book as well as the book Looking for Alaska. The book The Fault in Our Stars was inspired through working as a student chaplin at a children's hospital. After seeing children with life-threatening illnesses, he decided to become an author and write this book.