Final Book Review of Where the Heart Is

In Where the Heart Is, by Billie Letts, the main character, Novalee, goes through many struggles after she becomes pregnant and her boyfriend has to uproot them. Willy Jack Pickens, her boyfriend, decides to take a job in California to support Novalee and their unborn child. Novalee is surprised by this because it’s the first adult action he’s chosen to taken that someone has forced on him. While traveling through Oklahoma, Novalee needs to stop to use the restroom at the local Walmart. After she goes in to use the restroom and buy some house shoes for her swollen feet, she sounds out that Willy Jack has taken off without her. He left her stranded in the middle of nowhere and she only has seven dollars and seventy-seven cents. Her adventures of trying to survive continue as she becomes closer to having her child and Willy Jack’s music career takes off without Novalee by his side. The author Billie Letts makes you melt like putty when reading this heart wrenching story about a very relatable character, Novalee and her struggles. Billie Letts takes the characters through many main themes in the book.

The first theme is about continuing life no matter how hard it’s become and no matter what’s going on in it. This is an important lesson for everyone to learn because everyone’s life gets difficult and hectic. Billie Letts shows this by using all of Novalee’s struggles as examples. In chapter something on page something, Novalee says “Then Novalee Nation, seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight, slipped off her thongs and there, in the middle of the Walmart, she began to turn.” She makes it clear that it’s not easy to raise a baby and have no one to take you in and nowhere to go. This theme makes you think about how you should look at life in general and how you shouldn’t worry about everything going on. It’s this theme that makes a crowd go wild for someone that did something great. Though it may be an overused theme and continuously used by your mother, it works. It truly works to get the theme across without spelling it out for you.

The second theme throughout the book is that doing something you’ll regret isn’t worth it. This theme is hugely displayed when Willy Jack takes off at the beginning, after leaving Novalee behind, and at the end when Willy jack says in a newspaper article that he needs her and wants to find her again. He truly regret leaving her and he definitely learned his lesson. Once Novalee decides to confront him, after she is scared he will come after them and take Americus, the baby, she says “’What are you going to do, Willy Jack? Go back to the Walmart. Think I’d still be there waiting for you seven years later?’” Novalee says this on page three hundred and forty-eight. This lesson may be etched out in a strange way but it shows just how perfectly set up Billie’s characters were.

Where the Heart Is contains many life lessons that relatable events can teach you and you can learn from. This realistic fictional novel is a great read for those interested in good books and likes to relate closely to the main characters. There are a few slower areas but the story certainly does pick up quickly. Where the Heart Is makes you want to continue to devour and pour your eyes over the pages. This book is definitely an excellent choice for any teenage girl and young women looking to find a good book. This books rating would be an eight out of ten for excellent writing style and craft but taking away the slow parts it could make it a ten.

Top Five Growing Up

Blog Post #7

                A book that is non-fiction in my mind needs to be about 98% true and let me explain that. A non-fiction book needs to be factual and truthful. An author in my mind can take the 2% and rearrange dialogue, small details, and the take out a bit of the unnecessary things to keep the story rolling. If this non-fiction book is for a doctor or other professional field I would highly recommend making that 100% and keeping all of the little tidbits in. I like half-truth stories but they should go under the section of realistic fiction because only half of it actually occurred. I think the reason Frey and Mortenson changed his fictional book in to a memoir was so that it would simply get published. I could understand bending the truth a bit in a memoir just because you need to keep the reader interested but you can’t change huge details that sticks out and makes you remember it the most. What Frey did wasn’t non-fiction and it wasn’t 95% truthful because running someone down with a train is 100% different than just being as he said “affected” by it or as I say he was just upset. Minute details can’t be changed from a couple of harmless hours in jail to month after month of agony. It’s changing small details in to something big that really irritates me.  David Shield had a great idea of taking other people’s writings and making a new story. He is trying to take out that line of fiction and non-fiction. This is not a plus for me considering I go to check out books in certain sections of the library and if they come out with a whatever section then I would have problems. I think there needs to be a separation like a pizza and peanut butter where it’s very strange together, correct?   Books should be evenly and happily divided.

Schools and Reading post6

I believe that Gallagher makes a lot of true points in his book, Readicide, that schools should start to consider when teaching literary fiction to their students. Schools do certainly kill the enjoyment of reading by looking far too deep in to phrases said and sending us off on own to fend for ourselves through the heavy layers of the Shakespearian language. A teacher shouldn’t have to stop after one line and say what it means and do that for five million more; students should learn at a younger age to learn and interpret the language of literary fiction. To me we should be taught to enjoy reading and want to continue on in our lives with that want and drive to read more material. I think that schools should continue to teach literary fiction but to an extent.

Literary fiction is a part of society that needs to stick around for a really long time. Some of these stories have been kept for hundreds of years, made in to millions of copies, and taught in many schools. These classic books are starting to put a bore to reading but are very important to read. Teaching these classics can take time with many stops and tests in between paragraphs. We shouldn’t break up the books in to chunks but figure out a way to understand the language and be able to read them more ‘fluently’ and faster without constantly breaking.

I also think that we need to learn these literary fiction classics because we’ve kept them and haven’t gotten rid of them. If we stopped teaching them to the younger generations then they won’t be able to understand references from them that we have used in movies and society. I believe it’s important to keep up reading literary fiction and not let in die.

Extremely Lound and Incredibly Close Trailer post5

Blog Post #4

Adapting the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, would be a very difficult movie to create. I know that they have already come out with the movie and I have not seen it.  The book itself is told from the perspective of a little boy named Oskar. There isn’t very much dialogue going on between characters because it’s mostly Oskar’s thoughts. A director would have a very hard time with that and would need to make more dialogue to make it more understandable. The book is also very confusing and a difficult read. Foer makes the book very jumpy like Oskar, so you have to pay close attention to little details or you’re officially lost until the next chapter. A director would have to cut out a lot of less important details and figure out what keeps the story moving and what’s less important.

A scene that would need to be kept in the movie is on page sixty-eight. This is the part where the main character Oskar is listening to his dad’s messages that he’d left on the answering machine saying that he was okay. That was a defining point in Oskar because he only replays them to hear his dad’s voice again. He ended up switching the phones so that his mom wouldn’t have to hear them. I think it is a really important part of the book that helps to keep the story moving along.

Another scene that would need to be kept in the movie would be when Oskar goes to visit Mr. Black. The part that makes this scene so special is that Oskar turns Mr. Black’s hearing aid on after ten years of having it turned off. Mr. Black ends up realizing there is a point to hear and see the world. This is a place in the book where Oskar and Mr. Black take off on their New York adventure together.  The whole movie wouldn’t make sense without it.

A last scene that would need to be kept in the movie would be after Oskar meets Mr. Black, he wants to know if he knew Thomas Schell. Oskar was searching for anyone who knew his dad. Mr. Black kept a file cabinet of names of people that he’d met in his life. The note card would say their name and how they met. Thomas Schell wasn’t in the stack which disappointed Oskar so Mr. Black decided to go out and help Oskar find the person with the last name Black that he needed. This part is another turning point in the story because Oskar is running out of options and lies as to get out of the house and solve the mysteries.  It really showed how much Mr. Black cared for people, it made his character loveable.

A scene that would certainly be cut from the film would have to be when the dad of Oskar wrote him a letter talking about how he was supposed to marry a woman named Anna. This part was very slow and it really did nothing to contribute to the book so far. He didn’t end up marrying Anna so I have to say it was irrelevant to the book and what Oskar was trying to do.

                Another scene that wasn’t moving the story forward would have to be when the Grandma wrote Oskar a letter about her mom and her husband. The mother part of that story didn’t make sense when she started writing about her husband. It just wouldn’t be portrayed easily in a movie and wouldn’t be a major scene.

Blog Post #3- What Is A Book

A book is a place where you can let your imagination run wild through the pages; metaphorically speaking. When you sit down and read a book, the author is trying to tell you and show you what they say things should look like but really your imagination is coming up with whatever you think something should look like. A book, to me, is imagination. It’s getting in to a good story and letting your brain develop a whole setting for the characters. You start to imagine different situations and different places than you’ve ever been or seen before. You get to explore new situations and a whole new world that you’ve never thought of. I like the idea of seeing another side to a similar situation. A book let’s your imagination go where regular everyday life can’t take you. And books don’t make you as crazy as that last sentence sounds.

                E-books vs. regular hard backs and what do I think? I’d have to say that overall e-books are cheaper, faster, and more convenient for on the go people. Yes, it’s not like cracking open a book and being able to see how far in you are. It’s more the cost and time efficiency that draws people to a certain side. I would have to say even though I don’t own any e-readers and my iPod screen is too small, I still prefer having a real book in my hands. It’s just what I prefer because I don’t want the strain on my eyes and I don’t want the accidental chance of dropping it and breaking it. If the e-reader crashed or you broke it, face it you are out of luck until you can go to the store or order another one online.