A Long Way Gone: End

In the end of the book, Ishmael thankfully gets taken out of the war and is put into a rehabilitation center. However, all the boys that were put into the rehab center started acting like wild, caged animals. They attack the cook, throw bowls and other things at the nurses, and they even break into the medical supplies to fulfill their need for drugs. Once again, Ishmael is having another internal conflict with his need for drugs and violence in order to feel normal again and go back to how he was before the war. Ishmael goes through his first breakthrough in rehab when he meets a nurse named Esther. As I mentioned in my first blog post about the beginning of the story, Ishmael has a really strong connection and attachment to rap cassettes. In order to try to get him to open up, Esther buys him a Walkman and rap cassettes. At first it makes Ishmael mad but eventually he does open up to Esther and starts to talk about all of the painful memories of the war that he wanted to forget. Even though Ishmael does start to open up, he does have his moments of anger and will lash out out of nowhere. After all that he's been through, it's understandable that he most likely just wants to be alone. He relied on himself to survive and feels like at this point, there's no one he can trust but himself because everyone else betrayed him in some way during the war.

The rehab center somehow locates Ishmael's uncle Tommy and he returns home with his uncle in Freetown and begins the school year. On May 25, 1997 violence breaks out in the capital and for the next five months gunmen rule the streets, looting, raping, and killing people. This is ironic because Ishmael has escaped the war only for war to find him again. Uncle Tommy becomes ill one night and ends up dying in Ishmael's arms. He calls a girl Laura that he met and asks if he can come to New York to live with her and she agrees. Ishmael ends up escaping the country illegally and is sheltered as a war refugee.

At the end of the book, there is a question asked that is a story usually told to young people in the village once a year. "There was a hunter who went into the bush to kill a monkey. He had looked for only a few minutes when he saw a monkey sitting comfortably in the branch of a low tree. The monkey didn't pay him any attention, not even when his footsteps on the dried leaves rose and fell as he neared. When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed. Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: 'If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don't, your father will die.' What would you do if you were the hunter?" (217). Ishmael thought about this for years and he finally concluded to himself that if he were the hunter, he would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.

Q: What do you think is the reasoning behind Ishmael's answer to that question? What would YOU do if you were the hunter?

A Long Way Gone: Middle

In the middle part of the book is where Ishmael is on his long journey to find peace from all of the madness and war around him. He knows he has to keep moving or the Rebels are going to catch up with him and either recruit or kill him. At this point, him and his group are just traveling from village to village, hoping to find shelter for as long as they can. When they entered a new village, they realized that it had already been attacked by the Rebels. The villagers stole their shoes and chased them out of the village which now forced them to walk on 120-degree temperature sand while barefoot. The boys are hungry and exhausted and every time Ishmael acknowledges the struggles that he is facing, his mind starts to wonder to darker places. He begins to fear not only his surroundings but he starts to fear himself too. His mind keeps going to violence. This shows the concept of man versus self because he has to fight himself mentally to be able to survive. In every village that Ishmael and his group go to, people will either fear them or attack them. They are being treated like dangerous monsters and Ishmael is afraid that he might actually be becoming a monster.


A few chapters later, Ishmael ends up getting recruited. He now is being forced to kill people and has no other choice if he wants to survive. In the book, Ishmael says "A young soldier came by with a plastic bag full of some kind of tablets" (116). The corporal starts giving him drugs so that it will boost his energy to be able to fight in the war. These drugs basically put him through a "trip" so that he just blanks out and will be able to kill people without hesitation or being afraid. Ishmael and his friends are still children and don't know whether they should express themselves like children or to just suck it up and act like adults. They don't know what is going on around them or what's going to happen and that is what scares them the most. They still have the ignorance and innocence inside of them as children and they aren't able to express that anymore because that's what puts them in danger.  What is happening around them doesn't feel real until they are forced to take part in the killing as well, which is the one thing they were once against. "A splash of blood hit my face. In my reverie I had opened my mouth a bit, so I tasted some of the blood" (118). This is when it all finally became real to Ishmael. He had just watched someone be shot to death and now he has the blood of a dead man on his face.  

Q: Do you think you would be able to grow up this quickly at 15 and throw your childhood away? Do you think you'd be able to handle everything you witnessed and still be able to be strong and cope with it?

A Long Way Gone: Beginning

The war book that I have been reading is called "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah. It is a memoir that Ishmael wrote about his experience in having to become a child soldier when he was only 15 years old. In the first chapter, he talks about how his journey began when he was 10 years old, right before the civil war comes to his village. Ishmael, Junior, Talloi, and Mohamed have a rap group together that they formed when Ishmael was eight years old. In January of 1993, they all leave their village of Mogbwemo to take a trip to the town of Mattru Jong. Right after they leave, the Rebels attack their village. Ishmael doesn't know if his family or anyone from his town his dead or alive. "The rebels had attacked the mining areas...this town will be next, according to the teachers" (9). Ishmael and his group wanted to go back to their own village to see if everyone was okay but once they realized that the Rebels were coming for the village that they were in at that time, they knew they just had to keep it moving and couldn't turn back.

In this chapter, comparison and contrast are used to show what Ishmael's concept of the war was before the rebels had attacked. It makes more of an emphasis on how ignorant Ishmael and his friends were to how traumatizing the war really was because they did not realize the effects of war until it hit them right in the face. His flashbacks that he has of his peaceful life before the war show the beginning of him starting to lose his innocence as a young child. Also, the rap music that him and his friends are into, represents Ishmael's way into the modern world. Rap becomes a way for the group to be able to express themselves through the lyrics that they write themselves. Ishmael carries a cassette tape with their raps on it around with him all the time which symbolizes him holding onto what he has left of his childhood and his innocence.

Q: How would you feel if you knew you would literally have to run to save your life? Do you think you'd be able to process what was going on at such a young age?

The End: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

The end of this book was probably my favorite part of the entire story of Virginia's life. Towards the end of the book was when Virginia finally realized her self worth and realized that she actually CAN stick up for herself and do what she wants to. It all started when she went to Walla-Walla in Seattle over Thanksgiving to visit her best friend Shannon who moved there at the beginning of the year. Her mother nixed the idea as soon as Virginia brought it up to her but something inside Virginia pushed her to go and buy a nonrefundable round trip ticket to Seattle with her own money and without her parents knowing. Then a couple days before she was going to leave, she just straight up told them that she was going to Seattle and that she had bought a ticket. Her mother immediately reminded her that she said no absolutely not and that she forbids her to go and Virginia counts to five and simply replies with "I'm going."

At this point of the story is where the turning point occurs. While she is in Walla Walla and reunited with her best friend, Virginia's spirits are definitely lifted. She forgets about everything that is going on back home and just let's herself be happy again. Her and Shannon end up getting body piercings together. Shannon gets her tongue pierced and Virginia gets her eyebrow pierced. She doesn't even care what her parents are going to think because she loves the eyebrow ring and she's finally doing what makes her happy and not what makes everyone else happy. She's no longer feeling numb. She comes back home and everyone is complimenting her on her eyebrow ring, even Brie the popular girl says something to her! She also dyes her hair purple after her mom said that the cute dress she bought doesn't match her hair color. Virginia clearly did this out of spite just to get a reaction out of her mom and Virginia was loving every second of pissing her mom off. Of course everyone loved Virginia's new hair and complimented her on that as well. Virginia joined a kickboxing class and now goes a couple times a week and has met two new friends in that class since then. She has also started a webzine at school for all her classmates and even got some of her classmates to join her club including Froggy. Everything is finally looking up for Virginia and to top it off, at the end of the story Froggy asks Virginia to kiss him in public for the first time in front of all of their friends.

I think what the author of this book is trying to say is that you should always do what makes YOURSELF happy because at the end of the day, it's your life to live and no one else's. Virginia lived her whole life always trying to gain approval and acceptance from her parents by doing what she thought they wanted but she never received that acceptance from them. However, when Virginia finally realized her self worth and started making her own decisions on what she thought was right for herself on her own, that's when she started gaining that respect from not only her parents but also from all of the other people around her. I really enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to any teenage girl to read! Most teenage girls suffer from body image issues and even if a teenage girl hasn't, every teenage girl has some problem or struggles that they are dealing with in their life.

 Do you think you could relate to Virginia in any way? Why or why not?

The Middle: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

In the middle section of The Earth, My Butt, and Other Round Things, a lot of huge and somewhat devastating things happen to Virginia. First, she decides to go on a new diet which causes her to basically starve herself and hurt her own body. Then, she finds out that her older brother Byron, the one she has always looked up and adored since she was a kid, was kicked out of his college for date raping a girl named Annie Mills and has to move back home. This incident also caused her to ward off anything sexual or anything to do with boys for that matter which resulted in her telling Froggy to flake off. She was distancing herself from everyone and letting all of these problems affect her more than she should have. If I was in her place, yes I would take it hard but I don't think I would let it affect me as much as she let it affect her. While I was reading I just kept thinking, "Why is she THIS upset over her brother being kicked out of college?" and I know the answer. It made her see Byron for what he really is and what he is isn't perfect like she always thought. However, she should have taken this information and benefited from it instead of letting his faults bring her down. She always felt like she never belonged in her perfect little family but now she's able to see all of the real imperfections shine through. When her family never showed any real emotion about the incident or always referred to Byron date raping a girl as his "ordeal" she could also see that her mother and father, especially her mother, always scraped things like this under the rug so that they could APPEAR to be the perfect little family that they in fact are not.

Virginia's grades started to slip in school and she wasn't able to focus on her school work as much. She kept cutting school and going off and venturing on her own unbeknownst to anyone else. She totally cheated on her new diet because food was the only thing that she knew would keep her sane for the time being. Things for her felt like they were spiraling out of control. She just couldn't snap out of this funk. This was Virginia's breaking point. Her mother's constant comments about Virginia's weight just made her all the more stressed out than her family even knew that she was.

If I was Virginia, I would have handled this a lot differently than she did. She always kept quiet and never let herself speak her mind whenever her mother made an insulting comment about her body or when her mother would always say "How about we try Salon Z instead?" which is a plus sized clothing store for teenage girls instead of letting Virginia shop in the regular teen section. I would have stepped up to my mother and told her that I could handle my weight and my body on my own because it's truly none of her business especially since I'm already healthy. I think that Virginia would feel better if she realized her worth and realized that she deserves to be treated like a real human being and not an object that needs to be "fixed." Has someone in your family ever negatively commented on your body? If so, how did that make you feel and how did you respond? If not, how would you feel and how would you respond?

The Beginning: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

 For my first SSR book, I started reading The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. I am currently on page 80 out of 246 pages of the entire book. This book is about a 15 year old girl named Virginia Shreves who is a little over weight for her age. No teenage girl wants to be considered overweight but what makes it harder for Virginia is that she comes from a "perfect" looking family. Her mother is a gym junkie and is constantly working out and eating healthy. Her older brother Byron is popular and very attractive and she also has a very attractive and slim older sister named Anais. She likes this boy named Froggy who comes over every Monday and all they do is make out in her room when no one is home. However, outside of her room, they do not communicate nor are they ever seen with each other in public. Virginia has learned to accept this because she thinks just as badly about herself as she thinks everyone else does as well. For the beginning part of this book, Virginia explains what it's like being an over weight 15 year old at a school full of perfect skinny girls who think they are better than everyone else. Virginia's best friend Shannon has recently moved away and now Virginia is left to bear the terrible days of high school all by herself. She eats by herself in the bathroom and one day while she was in there, she heard Brie, Briar, and Brinna, the three most popular and perfect girls in her school, talking. They started to talk about Virginia's older brother and how Brie was flirting with him on the train over the weekend. The thought of this made Virginia sick but what they said next made her feel like her stomach was gonna fall out. They mentioned her name and referred to her as the "chubby girl" but that's not even the worst part. After a moment Brie says "All I can say is, if I were that fat, I'd kill myself."

This made Virginia feel the lowest she has ever felt. On top of that, her parents start pressuring her about her weight and wanting her to go on a diet. Her mom takes her to a new doctor and even though she is heavier for her age, all of her tests come back that she is perfectly healthy. Even though she is healthy, the doctor still recommends that she go on a diet. This diet basically turns into Virginia starving herself and restraining from eating any type of real food.

Do you think that starving herself is the best way for Virginia to lose weight and be more happy with herself and her body? Do you think Virginia's mom should be more worried about her daughter's health rather than looking perfect like the rest of the family? Why or why not?