ENG 100-Young Adult Lit.

Trying to find something to connect to this book was somewhat difficult. The book Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor centers around the aforementioned "dreamer" in Lazlo Strange. He is a war orphan who ends up becoming a junior librarian at the Great Libary of Zosma. An early theme, or topic, in the book, is that a dream chooses the dreamer and not the other way around. Lazlo is worried that his dreams chose poorly and since the age of five has been determined to figure out why the name of the Unseen city was "stolen" from his mind. He is constantly seeking information about the Unseen city when he is a librarian and reads constantly. Dreaming of one day making it to the city of the Unseen. Eventually, this dream becomes a reality when he accompanies Tizerkane warriors on a journey to the city. We learn later as that five half-human children of murdered gods are trapped in the citadel that floats over the Unseen city. This brings us to the character Sarai, the...

For a while now our culture has been soaking up zombie-related media as much as it can. And while I haven’t been one of those many people, there’s no denying how popular zombies related things have become. For example, one of TV’s most popular TV shows ever is The Walking Dead which started in 2010 and really helped grow the post-apocalyptic genre that is so popular in today’s culture. Many shows or movies that have been centered around this are popular because they allow us to examine mankind and hypothetically see what decisions are made. An apocalypse reveals people’s true colors and allows for the fictional society to start over. Allow for our society today to accept and be captured by these experiences. Our society has chewed up this type of storytelling as of late, and so people will—for better or worse—prefer something zombie related than something based around US history. However, author Justina Ireland combines the two in an interesting way in her novel Dread Nation. She blend...

When I was little I was interested in what I believed most boys my age were into. Things like superheroes, cartoons, and other little kid things. When I was about 8 this focus changed almost overnight when my dad brought me to my first baseball game. My parents helped me find my biggest passion when they decided to send me to that game with my dad. Sports allowed me (an only child) to make friends and learn how to be a teammate. To learn what it felt like to succeed and to learn what it felt like to fail. And most importantly they allowed me to bond and strengthen my relationship with my dad. Now 20 I have been across the country with him to see all 30 MLB stadiums over several years and crossed off a bucket list father-son item. Final stadium of our trip I've played four sports, but my favorites are baseball and soccer. These are also the ones that I know a lot about the racism and barrier in their history's. It took people to bravely stand together to prove th...

When I first started reading Dreadnought, a novel by April Daniels, I quickly thought back to a class I took spring semester last year. I wanted to switch out of one of my classes and decided that I wanted to knock out one of my cornerstones. I ended up focusing on my history cornerstone but didn’t want to take a conventional history class—something like the classes that focus on early 13th-century history didn’t interest me—this was because I really wanted to take a class that I would both interested in and engaged with. Since I was switching in to a class late, I had limited options, so the class that I ended up taking was a gender and sexuality studies class. The class looked at how women and sexuality were treated in the past. And how this past has affected current stigmas or treatment, while also looking to find ways to best help accept people and support their choices. This theme can be seen when reading Dreadnought, a novel in which a boy becomes one of the world’s mos...