Links and Displays

This video really makes me think about how the two kids in my book must've felt when they were getting bullied and really relates to the two main characters.

Links and Displays

http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/article/social-emotional-skills/bullying-and-teasing-no-laughing-matter
This Article is based upon bullying which relates to my book "Give a Boy a Gun" since the main characters end up commiting suicide because of bullying.

Links and Displays

This is how I imagine the school shooting that Brendan and Gary caused to look like in "Give a Boy a Gun"

Give a Boy a Gun

http://www.pledge.org/?p=Give+a+Boy+a+Gun

"Give a Boy a Gun" Links and Displays

This picture reminds me of the book I'm reading "Give a Boy a Gun" because the main character Brendan got bullied a lot at school and no one ever did anything about it which caused him to commit suicide.

"Give a boy a Gun" Reading Skills

In my book Give a Boy a Gun, i'm really curious as to why Brendan's friends never stopped him from shooting some kids at school. He told his friends Allison and Gary, that he wanted to kill all of the people that bullied him basically. "We got up there, and he took this gun out of his pocket. Like, first we thought it was a toy, then Gary thought maybe a starter's pistol. Brendan said it was real, and I asked what he was going to do with it. I won't use the words he used, but basically he said he was going to blow away some kids at school" (Strasser 73). I don't understand why his friends wouldn't tell an adult or anyone about this, and want to know why they let it happen instead of trying to help him instead of just shrugging it off and thinking of it as a joke. One text to world connection i thought of while reading this book was that there are tons and tons of kids who have thought of suicide and murdering other people like Brendan did, and made me compare the reason that Brendan wanted to kill himself was cause he was bullied, and that is probably a lot of other kids reasons too. A text to text connection I thought of was this book I read called How I Survived Seventh Grade and it was about a girl who got made fun of a lot because she was nerdy and had big feet and stuff, and was sometimes depressed just like Brendan and Gary, and they reminded me of each other since they both got made fun of a lot.  A text to self connection I had was that I don't really connect with the main character Brendan because I have never gotten bullied like him, the only connection we have is when I was in fifth grade I dressed weird and got made fun of by this one kid, but besides that I never got made fun of and hope I never do, so I can't really relate to this book.

Tone and Mood

The tone of my independent novel Give a Boy a Gun is mostly anger and rage. An example of this would be "Sam Flach will die slowly. I will shoot him in one knee, then the other, then a gut shot so he'll have no friggin doubt where he's going. And he will stare up at me with fear in his eyes he has never known, and I will pull that friggin barrel right against his forehead and say "Gee sorry, Sam," then blow his friggin brains out "(Strasser 41). The mood of this book would be sad and ashamed. An example of this would be "Everyone thinks about suicide when they're a teenager. At least, almost everyone I know. It's just, like, something really crappy happens and you're in this horrible pain, and what's the point?" (Strasser 52). This shows mood since when i read it I felt really sad and sorry for those kids that feel this and made me ashamed that people would cause other people's lives to be this miserable. There is no point in my book so far where a character has swayed the beliefs of others, but one of the main characters Gary's mom tried to sway his beliefs by taking him to a psychologist but it didn't work because he was still kind of depressed and didn't persuade him any differently. She didn't really use a tone so maybe if she used a more caring and worried tone it might have impacted her persuasiveness not to kill himself.