Write a book review and give your opinion or rating on it and tell why you give it that rating.

(the video means nothing, listen to the audio) This audio represents how Jack gets scared when the police stop him because he thinks he will get caught.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2lPcQSzPU
I thought Hole In My Life by Jack Gantos was an excellent book. It really does teach you a life lesson, drugs and alcohol are not a good influence in your life and its best if you stay away from them. Why? Well, as i said in my earlier posts, all the drugs and alcohol interfered with his writing career. I think that throughout the book he was trying to tell his readers that most of the things that he did were a mistake. Dealing with drugs got him to go to jail and so on and so forth. If i were to rate this book on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the highest, i would give this book an 8 because i really liked all of the action and suspense that took place in the 200 pages of this book. What's great is that i understood the book very well and I do recommend this book to everyone.

Can you relate this book to another work that you have read or experienced? How is it connected?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY3Jf4PskvU
Yes, i can relate this book to a soap opera that i watched not too long ago. It's exactly the same as the book, except that instead of it being a man its a woman. She goes through the same experience as Jack, and guess what? She also gets offered 10,000 dollars for sailing a ship full of hashish, drugs. She risks her life many times and lucky for her that she doesn't get caught by the police...until one day something goes wrong! She gets caught and the police eventually send her to jail. She also loves to read and write although drugs and alcohol get in her way. There are also times where she simply loses control of what she is doing because she is too drunk to understand what is going on. So, the soap opera and the book are basically the same thing.

Do you relate to your main character? How and why?

I'm somewhere stuck in the middle because theres different qualities that we each have. I don't think that i relate to my main character because my main character Jack is the type of person who has a hard time choosing and often doesn't know what he is doing. He's also the type of person that likes to drink and do drugs. I on the other hand really don't want to do that, i'm 100% against that. On the other hand, Jack and I both like to read and write. His passion is writing and wants to pursue that as a career but he doesn't want his friends to know and anyways, all of the beer he drinks and drugs he does gets in the way. "My secret journal was an old hardback copy of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, in which i spent hours writing in a tiny script between the tightly printed lines." (Gantos, 8) He's also the type of person that goes under peer presure very often. Most of the time that he drinks and does drugs is because his friends convince him to do it. I'm not like that because if theres something that my friends are doing and i don't want to, then i won't follow them and just go the other way.

How is suspense built into the story?

Suspence is built into the story because Jack decides to get involved with drugs. One of his friends tell him about a job offer that is open. The job is to sail a ship across the ocean. Although it seems easy, here's the catch, the ship will be loaded with lots and lots of hashish, drugs. Its his job to sail the ship and not get caught by the police. If he makes it safe and sound he will be paid 10,000 dollars, IN CASH! If something goes wrong and he does get caught, then he will go to jail and not get paid at all. See, he's taking a BIG chance and risking a lot just to be able to get all that money. Hows this suspense? Well dont you want to read the book and find out if he gets caught or not?

What are the conflicts in the novel and how do they make one of the characters act/react?

The external conflict that Jack Gantos has to go through is that he doesnt know how to control himself when he is doing drugs or drinking alcohol. "I kept drinking more and more until i discovered i could drink lots of beer...i had no tolerance for that much alcohol and i always became blind drunk and ferociously ill, spending almost every night loudly heaving my guts out in the toilet while begging God for mercy. I was a mess." (Gantos, 13) The way he reacts to this is that after drinking so much, he gets sick and just vomits. The internal conflict that he has to go through is that he is having a hard time deciding whether he wants to be a writer and go to college or if he should work and earn money to buy drugs and beer. The way that he reacts to this is he tries that out, but gets into trouble later on in the story.

Unanswered Questions 2

Dear Chasity Pureheart,

 I barely started reading about you and it seems like you don't know who you are. Maybe its because you move a lot and you don't get to stay in one place because of the fact that you and your mom are running away from something? So far im a little confused in why all this is happening and i have a lot of questions to ask you. Why is music such a bad thing for your mom and why does she think its bad luck? How did this "ritual" start from? How many times have you moved? Why do you always change your name? I found it interesting that you and your mom are a different from eachother in your own ways. You really like listening to music and your mom simply can't stand it. I think its cool how you like music as much as i do and it makes me think "Why don't you just talk to your mom about how much you like music and maybe she will accept it?" Well, hopefully my questions get answered along the way. Anyways, good luck throughout the story!

                                       Sincerely,

                                             Jocelyn

That's a wrap.

The last book that i read is called The Party Room: Last Call by Morgan Burke. I really enjoyed reading it because it had lots of moments of suspense and drama. The author seemed to really know how to "bring the book to life" which made me wonder if that part of writing the book was hard. She must have had an enormous imagination because i felt like if i was watching as everything happened throughout the book. It was a great page turner and i loved how i was able to have mental pictures from just reading an excerpt. I would recommend this book to anybody who likes reading about mysterious murders. I know that other people will enjoy this book as much as i did. It was a great book.