Characters

I've been reading a lot of books lately that have one focused main character and I've been wondering what makes that character believable. I couldn't figure out if it was the way they thought, their imperfections, or the balance of their personality in general. But then I thought if that were true then there could be no perfectly angelic characters and no perfectly evil characters. I noticed that a perfect character seems a lot more realistic once they've done something wrong. And also how the bad guy becomes a lot more believable the second that he has a doubt about what he's done. It doesn't really matter whether or not he changes but the little waver is enough to convince you that he is real. It's much easier to think of a beautiful and equally stupid person or a smart and not-so-gorgeous person. Otherwise it seems just too good/bad to be believable.

It seems to be easier for some people to admire stories if they feel that they can relate to the main character. It doesn't have to be much it could be the gender, race, problem they're having, or even the fact that they have a little sibling too. It makes it easier for the reader to see the story clearly through the main characters eyes. It also allows you to bond with the main character a little bit. But most of all the story becomes a little bit more realistic, it could just be the little details but it all makes a slight difference. The story might be completely and obviously fictional, yet the reader has a new understanding if they can relate to the main character.

I used to think that it was all about the character having imperfections. But it can't be because if there is a perfect person and they are hated, it's not an imperfection on their part. I think it would be much easier to consider these characters if the narrator is jealous of them because it shows jealousy which is believable. If a main character is perfect then something has to go wrong because no body wants to read a boring book about the non existent problems in some one's faultless life. You can only write a story about an problem or an event. Say there is a book about a girl who wins the lottery. The book will most likely be about the struggle in her life leading up to that or how the greed and wealth corrupts her. There's a reason why happy endings happen at the end of a story.

It's hard to believe that a person is good or evil in real life, why should it be any different in a book. There are the typical bad guys the villains of fairy tales it is assumed that they are good or bad. But in the real world everything is in shades of gray, its not all black and white. Have you ever wondered why people like stories that favor the bad guy? If you have ever really read the book "Wicked" you'd know that it is not about an amazing friendship between two girls (as you often hear on all the commercials). Its about what could make this girl Elphaba grow up into the wicked witch of the west. I personally think that people are drawn to this story because they find it hard to believe that she was a completely evil character since the day she was born, They know that something must have happened to make her into the person that you see through Dorothy's eyes in "The Wizard of Oz".

I think that it is really a combination of this that makes characters believable, likable, and interesting. I think that next time you read a book think about the first time you actually began to like a character. What did it? What changed to make them likable? If it hadn't happened would you still like the character? If you didn't like the character would you still be reading the book? Just think about it because I think you'll realize something about the writing that you might have never even seen before.

The Odyssey of KP2

I'm in the middle of a really interesting nonfiction book. Usually it is hard for me to find a non fiction book, that's not a memoir, that I am actually interested in. But this book really caught my attention and the way it is written is amazing as well as it's topic. "The Odyssey of KP2" by Terrie M. Williams is about an abandoned seal pup (known as KP2) which causes quite a commotion on its island and in it's specie's history. The book is also partly about the biologist who takes on the task of caring for the young pup. The biologist's name is Dr. Terrie M. Williams, she wrote the book as well. I think that hearing this story from the perspective of someone who lived it, sort of makes the book a memoir. But on the other hand there is also a lot about the seal pup that the author wasn't there for. I'm kind of confused about what the definition of memoir is, so I'm not sure exactly how this book would be classified. Putting all that aside, it is a really interesting book that is full of interesting but also manages to really reach out and make you sympathize.

KP2 stands for Kauai Pup 2. This means that KP2 was the second Hawaiian monk seal pup to be born on Kauai (the island) in that year. He had been abandoned by his mother right after he was born and was rescued by islanders when he was only two days old. The interesting thing about his abandonment is that it was very unknown for a mother monk seal to not protect her pup. Yet when KP2 was attacked by a 400 pond grown male, his mother did nothing to protect him. Normally mothers would rush at the attacker and even put their own lives in danger simply to protect their pup. The islanders who rescued KP2 had seen his mother do this before, to his sister a couple years before. The mother seal was the only one they had ever seen do this, it seemed that she just lacked the natural maternal instinct. I read this and instantly felt so bad for the little seal. He was being abandoned by his own mother, and mothers are the only ones who really look after pups, if he didn't have her then he had no one. Luckily KP2 was rescued soon enough. It was really sad to hear that his sister before him had to be euthanized (put to sleep) because the mother was ignoring her ad she was starving to death.

I love animals, I'm a vegetarian, I have four pets, and I am always the one that is completely preoccupied with any dog that is around. I personally love to hear about people that actually make a difference when it comes to animals facing extinction. This story touched me because I would love to imagine me being the one who can rescue a baby seal pup and turn around the threat of extinction for an entire species. I hear about these adventures in the arctic where they face extreme snow storms and other dangers when tracking down a polar bear that is nearly impossible to find. I love that because I read about it, hear about it, and I just wish that it was me. I loved the book and I'm really looking forward to finding out what's going to happen. If you are as much as an animal lover as me, if you just like hearing about dangerous journeys in the arctic, or if you just like heart-touching stories about people who are willing to do everything they can to save one little seal, then I think you would love this book as well.

The Secret Life of Bees

I've found that I tend to be drawn to books that have a serious conflict or issue in them. I tend to like realistic over fantasy. Even though I love a good Harry Potter book, I like the refreshing feel of hearing a close to real life situation that makes you think about your life in a new light. I feel like this happens more when you are reading a realistic fiction book or a memoir. Of these kinds of books I prefer the ones with really dramatic issues, I love Jodi Picoult and her subjects tend to be really sad topics like school shootings, suicides, losing a parent, being abused, or some other really depressing thing that somehow makes an amazing book.

In "The Secret Life of Bees" the main character is a girl named Lily Owens who had a rough childhood, believes that as a child she shot her own mother, and her father is a cruel man who is makes her kneel on grits when she is bad. Where I've gotten in the story, She is living at the house of three sisters who have a bee farm. It sounds odd but the truth is that she had just run away from home with her black maid/housekeeper/cook who is named Rosaleen, who had been having trouble with the racists in their town. The story is set after the Civil war when African Americans are legally free but are still treated like dirt by a lot of people. Lily is not racist and loves Rosaleen because she is almost a mother figure and tries her best to protect Lily from the abusive father T Ray. They came to stay with the sisters because Lily thinks that they knew her mother. Part of the ongoing theme in this book is Lily's guilt toward killing her own mother. She was really young and found a gun on the floor while her parents were fighting, It went off accidentally and her mother was hit.

It's such a terrible depressing idea, a little girl who is going to have to live with the fact that she killed the one person who she loved more than anything. To put it in the authors words "She was all I wanted. And I took her away. " It's really sad but you don't really know what to think of the mother because you've got the bits and pieces of memory from a four year old and possible lies from a drunk. As a reader you don't really know what really happened, all you know is what Lily thinks happened.

I guess one of the reasons I like books like this is the way they make you feel about yourself and your own life. Reading this made me think about what my life would be like if I didn't have my Mother and how different I would be if I had grown up without a mother. This is a historical fiction book so you can also think of what a life would be like in that time period and what you would think of differently especially being a girl. I don't know about everybody else but that's one of the things that I love about reading. It really opens up your imagination and allows you to think of all those what ifs.

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

I just finished an amazing book called “The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate”. It’s about a girl named Calpurnia Virginia Tate or “Callie Vee”. Callie is a young girl who was fourteen when the first cars were being toured around Austin. She lives with her parents, her six brothers, and her reserved, former captain, grandfather. She is a girl, and on top of that she is her mother’s only daughter so she is expected to become a young woman and sew and cook and knit. As a girl, I personally feel for Callie when she is expected to be a certain person simply because women at the time were not thought as equals to men. The problem is that Callie is not interested or good at the things that she is expected to do. When her grandfather introduces her to the amazing world of science (something she’s never been able to learn in school) she finds that studying science is something that she really wants to do with her life.

The story is really interesting to me because I have so many opportunities open to me that I could never have dreamed about if I was alive in Callie’s time. People were extremely sexist back then and it’s nice to see that society has changed and improved so much since then. One of the things that I like about this book is that it really gives you a chance to see how things worked in a typical family back then. I thought it was really interesting to see all that from this girl’s perspective because it really accents how she was really put below all her brothers for even the simplest of things. For example, every year her family assigns one of the kids to look after the turkeys before thanksgiving because it’s a chore that no one wants, then for Callie’s year she is skipped and the next oldest boy after her has to take care of them. This causes a lot of problems because her little brother is too young to understand that the turkeys are going to die and he tames them and, understandably, gets extremely upset when he finds out that they’re going to be eaten. All of this could have been avoided if her parents had let her do the chore even though it was considered a boy’s chore.

Half of the book is on her relationship with her grandfather and their expeditions to look for plant samples and specimens for the “laboratory” which is really an old shed in the back yard that her grandfather claimed and filled with his artifacts. She is the only one other than her grandfather that ever goes in there because her parents don’t want to bother him and most of her brothers think he’s crazy because he is not very social. But Callie is drawn to this man who seems to have the answer to everything and can actually teach her to find the answers to things that she doesn’t know. I think that if I had a person like that in my family I would want to know everything they had to say about anything. She and her grandfather believe that they have found a new species of this plant called “vetch”. She and her grandfather go through all the stuff to send pictures of the plant to a university to see if they would record it as a new species. At the end it is recorded as a new species and they name the plant after their family.

This is a book that I would recommend to other girls that are actually interested in seeing what it was like for girls like us a long time ago. I think this book has the perfect balance of science history and a real storyline. Calpurnia is a really fun main character because she is really opinionated and you get great perspectives on that kind of life. All in all I just loved this book.