The Giraffe Blog

Angie Thomas, the author of The Hate U Give , has a second and less well-known novel published in 2019. I believe that while it is less powerful than The Hate U Give , it does a good job of showcasing Thomas’s eloquent and captivating writing. On the Come Up shows the interconnectivity between race and poverty. It is also a unique coming of age story. It tells the story of an aspiring rapper named Bri. Bri lives with her mother and older brother in Garden Heights, a neighborhood near Jackson, Mississippi. They live in poverty, spending a portion of the book without the heat in their house. Jay, Bri’s mother, worked as a secretary before losing her job.  High school student Bri wants to make a name for herself as a rapper, but she can’t seem to step out of her father’s shoes. Her father Lawless was killed by a gang when she was a toddler. He was also a legendary rapper at battles in their community. Bri often attends those rap battles, sometimes competing, which is rare for a femal...

  “...I hope that they [readers] … feel enriched with fresh insights into the wonders of life at different scales...that they feel more hope for the future--that there is time to change the road we're on” (Carroll 268). The preceding quote, taken from the last sentence of Serengeti Rules , embodies the central impact of the book on its readers word by word. Truly, the author opened my eyes to the magnificent glory and complexity of life and gave me the hope that something could be done to save the environment. Plus, he did much more . Published in 2016, Serengeti Rules by Sean Carroll seamlessly stitches together stories of scientific discoveries from various biological and physiological fields into a set of rules of natural regulation. Carroll eloquently depicts each story from multiple angles as he zooms in and out of scenes, to and from specific time periods, and draws linkages across each story. It is only through such a clever narrated book that the audience truly unites wit...

       I read the book Ender’s Game for the blogpost, and I really enjoyed it. This book has a lot of writing that shows the change of the main character. This book was really fun to read and was great because of how it showed character change in the novel. Not only did the book show how Ender, the main character, change because of his surroundings, it also talks about how the higher-ups were able to manipulate Ender into becoming what he is. In the book, the world was just attacked by aliens called buggers, and a man named Mazer Rackham fought them off. Ever since, the world has been preparing to fight against the buggers, taking children to space to train them to learn how to fight at a very young age. Ender is chosen because his brother, Peter, was an extremely smart and talented person, but he was too violent and got sent back to earth. The people in charge looked for a new person and found Ender, Peter’s brother. After Ender joins the military program, the ...

             A Tyranny of Petticoats is a collection of 15 short historical fiction stories about girls in different time periods, from different places, in different scenarios. Each was written by a different author, and they were edited by Jessica Spotwood. The subjects of the stories range from a woman pretending to be a male pirate to a girl living in the civil war to a story about the Three Fates incarnated as young girls in Texas. Every single chapter was fun to read, but my two favorites were Pearls and The Legendary Garrett Girls. Pearls is about a woman who runs away from her fiance to teach at a school. One of my favorite lines from the book comes from this story; “ ‘You’d never shoot me, Helen,’ Richard says, smiling, his fangs showing. ‘No woman of mine would shoot me.’ So I shot him.”      Historical fiction has never been one of my go to genres, so this book was a little bit of a change for me. It was fast paced, becaus...

               I recently started to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the biography of Henrietta Lacks. It is a dense, information-packed book. It tells the story not only of the woman with the first immortal cells, but also one of the stories of a long line of shocking, race-based medical malpractices. Reading this book is not only interesting but it also helped me learn more about the injustice that some people in this country faced a while ago.  Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1st, 1920. She was one out of 10 children to her young mother and eventually went to live with her grandfather, while her other siblings went to live with relatives close by. Along with her grandfather, she lived with her cousin, David. She would later marry him and have five children.  She had her first child at the age of 14 and soon became a full time mother. Her family moved to Baltimore, where she had three of her other children. Her husba...

  ““Jonas,” she said, speaking not to him alone but to the entire community of which he was a part, “you will be trained to be our next Receiver of Memory. We thank you for your childhood,”” grandly declares the narrator, signifying a turning point in Jonas’s life as she alludes to a commencement in his journey towards escaping the mechanic and conformed life (Lowry 61). Published in 1993 and winning the Newbery Medal the following year, Lois Lowry’s The Giver unravels the story of Jonas, who is selected to receive all memory of the past from the Giver. Through the eyes of Jonas in his journey as a Receiver of Memory, the novel offers new perspectives towards the cultural and social factors surrounding us.  The author meticulously paints the concept of contentment through the setting of the story. The book depicts a community with utter conformity, outlined with strict rules, regularity, and interpersonal indifference. The fragile community depends on the protection of the go...