Advice letter to Tybalt

Dear Tybalt,
   You should've learned how to listen and not base people off of other people's feelings for them which aren't even about them, but about the enemy houses you are in. You don't know Romeo, you only know his last name, and for that you don't like him, which is hardly fair. Romeo was trying to reason with you, and I doubt that if he wasn't Romeo Montague that you would've picked a fight, or if your families didn't have a history. Juliet fell for him! He wasn't picking a fight or anything, but yet you viewed him as some sort of threat, which he wasn't until you went too far and killed Mercutio. You can dish it out but you can't take it, which is why when Mercutio taunted you, you fell for it. It would've made you look stronger if you had ignored him and listened to Romeo. Also, if you had just listened to what Romeo was saying to you instead of letting Mercutio antagonize you, you most likely wouldn't be dead.

Ready Player One

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

The book "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline is a story about a boy named Wade who is obsessed with the game OASIS, a virtual reality created by James Halliday. When James died, he set up a contest to win his fortune. On the OASIS, you have to find 3 keys and 3 gates to get to the egg, which gives you 240 billion dollars. Wade is one of many searching for this egg, but he also finds friends. I think that a theme that is important in this book is that you can't change who you are.

One character who proves this is Wade. He uses the OASIS as his escape from his real life, where he is a fat, pimply kid living in a trailer park. Online, however, he is skinnier with no pimples and he is just a normal boy. He is using the OASIS to escape from his reality, but really, the two worlds connect more than they should, and when he is being himself around characters, they know that he is poor. Another really good example of this is Wade's friend Aech. Aech, online is a white male who like to do PvP, but also searches for eggs. Later in the book, Wade learns that Aech is actually an African-American female. She says that she uses her OASIS identity so that she can get jobs and be taken seriously, but there is a real world, one she has been hiding from in her trailer, one that she now needs to face because she has a fortune and there is a world out there for her. Finally, the character Art3mis changes who she is. Art3mis is more true to herself than the other two characters, but she hides one big flaw on her face. She has a birthmark that takes up half of her face, and online she doesn't. She knows taht the OASIS is not the real world, and so when Wade tells her he loves her, she says that you can't love someone you've never met, but she wants to get rid of that insecurity on her face and love him back, but is afraid of what he would do when he saw her. In the end of the book, the inevitable happens and all of these characters die (other than Wade) and meet in real life. After all of the times where they were their OASIS characters, they now tackle each other in real life, and have no choice but to show their true colors.

In conclusion, the book Ready Player One is a great book to understand how important it is to be yourself, and people will see you for who you really are. If they are nice people, they will stick by you, but it is important that they know who they are sticking by first. Never be someone who you aren't.

Trust

The book "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is about a boy named Harry who is a wizard. He attends Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. This year, they are holding a special event called the Triwizard Tournament. Harry, who did not put his name in, is entered in the event and will have to keep himself alive through 3 insane tasks, one with a dragon, one where you had to go underwater for an hour, and the last one, a maze.In the maze, Harry finds himself face to face with the wizard who tried to kill him, Lord Voldemort. Throughout the book, Harry has to face challenges in and out of the tournament. It goes to show that you never know who to trust.

One example of never knowing who to trust is the Death Eaters. Although this doesn't directly apply to Harry, Voldemort doesn't know if he can trust his Death Eaters (basically servants). He believes that all of his Death Eaters will return to him to help him regain strength and get back his power. But now, 13 years later, only 2 of them have reached out to find him. Because Voldemort can't even rely on his servants, he feels that he has to regain their trust. That is why he lets Harry fight instead of just killing him. He still needs them to think that he can do everything and that he, not Harry, is the most powerful wizard alive. Also, Voldemort could be insecure. Whether it's because he is half-blood and will only associate himself with pure-bloods, or that he was defeated by a 1 year old, or that none of the Death Eaters thought he would be alive. This is another reason why he feels that he can let Harry go and fight him before just killing him off. Voldemort is trying to get rid of his past, but he needs other people to believe that he still has power and he is trying to force them to believe it.

Another example of never knowing who to trust is Mrs.Weasley. She does seem like a gossip, but always super nice to Harry and Hermione. However, when Rita Skeeter, the reporter who makes up stuff to get attention, writes that Hermione is "cheating" on Harry with Viktor Krum, one of the other schools contestants, Mrs.Weasley sends Hermione a smaller Easter egg. Harry and Hermione both look at Mrs.Weasely as a wizard mother, because neither of them have wizard parents, so they believed that Mrs.Weasley would know well enough that Hermione is nice and she would never cheat. Now, it would be harder for them to have her trust them on everything they know, such as the fact that Sirius Black actually isn't who the newspapers make him out to be, because what if she believes the newspapers and then turns him in as a killer?

Finally, Harry cannot trust Mad-Eye Moody. This is a really great example because Mad-Eye Moody isn't even actually Mad-Eye Moody. He is really Crouch Jr., who everyone believed to be dead, but is really helping Voldemort get Harry to him by rigging all of the events so Harry would get the Triwizard cup. First, he tips off Harry that there are dragons and that he can use his broom to get to them. Second, he tells Cedric, a competitor, that there is water for the second challenge, who tells Harry. FInally, he makes sure that Harry gets to the cup first, and sees to it that it is a portkey- a transporter- straight to Lord Voldemort. Harry thought that Moody just wanted to help Harry win, and he got Harry out of trouble a few times, so Harry really thought he could trust Moody. That, however, was not the case.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire shows that you never know who you can trust, which is true in really life as well. People get kidnapped and robbed and even murdered- sometimes by the people they thought they could trust.

Fear and Bravery

   The book "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" is about a famous boy named Harry Potter whose parents were killed by the most evil wizard of all time, Voldemort. His dads best friend, Sirius, escapes from Azkaban, the wizard jail, to find Harry and tell him he was not involved in killing his parents, and kill the person who was. The dementors are set up around Hogwarts, Harrys school, to keep Sirius from getting in because they think he is guilty. Hogwarts is the only place Harry can call home. His house is not pleasant, and going to Hogwarts is an escape. Although there is a boy who teases him and bothers him relentlessly, and hurts the people around Harry: Malfoy. One of the themes was fear, and another bravery. Although they are opposites, many times in the book they intersected, and became two feelings at the same time, by the same and different people.
   For one thing, Hermione slaps Malfoy when he is rude to Hagrid. Malfoy is taken aback, and I think Hermione scared him. This shows that Malfoy thinks he has all this power, but thats not really the case. When Hermione slaps him in the face, it was really a slap in the face to who he is. It made him realize that he isn't all that he thinks he is. This also makes him angry, especially because he doesn't know what to do about it. He was very afraid. This is something Hermione would never do, so she was very mad, but brave. Malfoy had been faking that a hippogriff Hagrid showed him hurt his arm, and so now Buckbeak might be executed, which made Hermione mad, because she can't stand injustice. Also, Hagrid has been helping her through really hard times, so she probably knows how amazing of a person he is and basically signals Malfoy to back off. She was brave to do this because she is nice and kind, and her reputation is clean, and to risk it on slapping someone, it must mean a lot to her. She hates him enough to be brave enough to screw up her record.
   Adding on to fear and bravery, whenever dementors attack Harry, he sees his parents, but they make him very weak because it's his parents death. His parents died when he was really young, only a baby. It was a traumatic experience, and it will probably never go away. Dementors "help" him remember. These are fearful memories, ones that haunt Harrys sleep every day. He has to stand up to it, eve when its hard, because its real, and that memory can remind him that he has no parents to learn from, nowhere to turn when he needs help. Happy memories at Hogwarts is all that he has left because he was sent to an awful family, and he had no friends there, but Hogwarts was all good. It is the most horrible thing that ever happened and it doesn't make him happy. If the dementors sucked all of his soul out, that could be all he is left with, and he would be extremely depressed. Harry knows that he really needs his good memories back, even though everything amazing that happens at Hogwarts is still there his parents death is still in his head. He knows he needs to be brave, which is why he tries to learn to make a Patronus, which scares away dementors with happy thoughts. However, you need to overcome the fear they give to produce this Patronus, which Harry does.
   Finally, the boggart turns into Professor McGonagall telling Hermione she failed all her exams, and Hermione runs from it. It is very surprising that Hermione ran away, even though she cares so much about grades. It was a conflicting decision because she could be afraid and fail, or not fully pass, Defense Against the Dark Arts, or pass everything and have so much doubt about how much she is taking on. The boggart just showed her her biggest fear, which she knows isn't true but is coping with so much. She may be ran away because she cracked from stress. Since the boggart turns into peoples biggest fears, failing is clearly what Hermione is afraid of the most. Maybe because she doesn't have wizard parents to look up to, she reallly wants to live up to a full potential. She worked too hard in all of her classes, so she could know that and realize she pushed herself too far. Its possible she was pushing that thought away, but she knows its there, and it scares her. But she is also brave enough to know it wasn't true, even though it took her some time. She figured out that she KNOWS she passed all her exams, and she kept her head up, which shows bravery even more.

Navigating Life

Being blind doesn't mean you can't see. In the book "Blind" by Rachel DeWoskin, the main character Emma is blind. She has to navigate through life in high school and she wants more independence, which isn't easy when you're blind. Through losses, untrustworthy friends, and of course being blind, Emma starts to see how the world around her is.

Logan, Emma's best friend, has kept a lot from Emma. She realizes that she had no clue what Logan had done over the summer, and she finds out from someone else. This really hurts Emma. It breaks their code that they made in elementary school. This is probably very frightening for Emma. It made them super close, and now they are drifting apart a little. I think this was because Logan was going through a rough time, and Emma didn't support her because she had become blind. Also, Emma feels lonely and, because she had been, lied to. Its harder for Emma to be able to trust Logan. Since Logan was her best friend, she feels alone, even with Logan. It also hurts her because she told Logan everything, but Logan kept a lot from her.

Emma has to deal with being blind. She can't always do what she wants to, which is hard when she is struggling for independence. For example, her art teacher acts as if Emma can't possibly do art, but Emma knows she can. She makes a sculpture to prove the art teacher wrong, which does make the art teacher see her doing art. She can't always see what people look like around her and exactly where they are. It makes it more difficult to envision people and what is happening. She meets new people and doesn't know what they look like. Also, when she meets Seb at blind school, she realizes he does everything she wants, which makes him a mentor and it is aggravating to know he is succeeding so easily, but she is still working hard.

One of Emma's classmates, Claire, dies from a drug overdose which led to drowning herself. It makes Emma realize some really important things. This could happen to anyone. Will Claire be an influence on other kids going through tough times, including Logan and herself? And speaking of her, why hasn't Emma killed herself yet. Emma knows that she is stronger than Claire, and maybe the family that loves her makes her stronger. Also, Emma knows that Claire struggled with being lesbian, and she can't decide if being blind is worse, but she thinks it is, which makes the situation confusing. She makes a group that comes together and talks about their problems so that no one else kills themselves, and Emma thinks in these groups- why are Claire's struggles too much to handle, but her's aren't?

Emma is dealing with tough problems in her life, and she is figuring out how to get through them, because even though she'll be blind forever, high school won't last forever. Both things, however, need to be the best they can in the moment. So what would you see in the world around you if you were blind?

"Shine" by Lauren Myracle

Have you ever felt alone or lost? The book "Shine" by Lauren Myracle tells the story of a girl named Cat who hides in fear a lot but decides, when her best friend gets assaulted for being gay, that she had to find who hurt him. She begins to explore outside again, which lets her become less afraid and she begins to trust her friends again. Cat has to overcome her struggles, that many teens can relate to, and come out of her shell because she needs help and can't live alone.

Cat must overcome struggles and come out her shell to find her best friends assaulter. For one thing, she begins to realize she can trust her brother again. Throughout the story, there are flashbacks of her brother and her having fun and helping each other. One of them was when she wanted to jump off a rock that was super high up, but her brother stopped her, which saved her life. She realizes slowly that he still wants to help her, and they start to find the assaulter together.

Another thing that Cat does is talk to other people more. It's not that she was shy before, but she lived in fear that she was not really there. In other words, she hadn't gone out unless there was a reason, and she was very cautious when she did. When she decides to find the assaulter, it was almost her personal way to overcome that. She realizes how much she misses the outside world. She even goes to the boys house that ruined her life. She stands tall and brings a pistol. She feels stronger. This shows her slowly turning her life back around, since it was really hard for her to do.

In conclusion, Cat overcomes her struggles and comes out of her shell. Some of the themes of the story are grief, homophobia, assault, fear and trust. Readers can connect to this story because they know what its like for her, or this book can make it easier to imagine it not being the end of the world for those who have gone through her struggles and those who haven't.

Mockingjay update

   One of my favorite movies right now is Mockingjay Part 1. It's based on a book by Suzanne Collins, and it is the third book in The Hunger Games series. In case you've never read or seen it, it is about a girl named Katniss who has survived two hunger games, or fights until only one person survives. After she was saved by the lost district 13 in her second year in the games, they are ready to start a rebellion. Katniss was chosen to be the symbol of the war, the mockingjay. She convinces all of the districts to join in and fight the capital, and a war begins. Whether or not they win, you have to read the book (or at least watch the movie). I'm super hyped for the last movie to come out on November 20th. A MONTH AWAY!!!!!! Seriously though, this is the best book/movie ever.

My Summer Reading

  Over the summer, I read books at camp when I had free time, and at my grandparents. I really enjoyed "Rain Reign" and "The Shadow Hero", but actually ended up giving up on "Lockdown" and "The Luxe" because I didn't find myself paying enough attention.
  "Rain Reign", by Ann M. Martin, is about a girl named Rose, who suffers from autism and is obsessed with finding homonyms. She has a dog named Rain, who is very special to her because she has a homonym in her name (Rain, Reign).  She also has a routine to follow every day, which involves walking her dog, eating dinner and doing her homework, all in a specific order. She and Rain are often home alone, as her mother is gone and her dad spends most of his time at the bar. Her uncle helps out a lot with her. One night, a hurricane hits, and Rose's father lets Rain out. She is sad and confused when her routine has to change. Her and her uncle try and try to find Rain, and eventually, they do. But they weren't the only ones.
  In "The Shadow Hero" by Gene Luen Yang, a boy living in New York City during immigration runs a store with his dad. He sees all the dangers around him, and his mom makes him a suit to be the green turtle after a superhero saves her. He fights a lot of dangers, but when he couldn't stop his dads death, a turtle spirit comes out of his dads body and grants him one wish. He becomes invincible to guns, and becomes a superhero, fighting the dangers of where he lives.
  "Rain Reign" was my favorite book I read this summer, and I actually recommended it to a few people. "The Shadow Hero" was good too!