Literature Extravaganza

How Cancer can Change Your Worldview By Lukas Perdekamp             Recently I finished reading The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams. This book is an autobiography focusing on all of life’s struggles that face Yip-Williams. It begins by discussing her life in Vietnam where she was born. She was born in South Vietnam with blindness, her paternal grandmother thought she was an embarrassment to their family, so she planned to poison her. Yip-Williams only narrowly escaped death, and at the age of three went with her family to Los Angles. In America she was able to attend the Williams College of Massachusetts and get a bachelor’s degree in English and Asian studies. Afterwards she graduated from Harvard and worked at Clearly Gottlieb Law Firm. She then was diagnosed with colon cancer which affected her life drastically as she could not do many activities she was previously able to do.     ...

So B. It  by Sarah Weeks is a novel about a 12 year old girl named Heidi who's mom is disabled and is taken care of by her neighbor, Bernadette. They live a somewhat regular life together, but only barely scrape by because of Heidi's uncanny luckiness. She goes up to slot machines and wins every time, buys lottery tickets and wins every time. But even with this "skill" life isn't so easy. Heidi knows nothing about her life, or her mother, or her past, because her mom doesn't have the ability to communicate what happened. She doesn't know who her dad is, when she was born, what her Mom's real name is, or pretty much anything. Most of all, she wants to know what the word "Soof" means, a word that her mom says all the time that is completely random.  Heidi finds a camera with a bunch of pictures of her mom at a home for the disabled and her curiosity peaks. She immediately wants to ask those people at the home what they know about her mom, and h...

Emily Chen The Book Thief is a historical fiction that follows the life of Liesel Meminger, a young girl who arrives in Nazi Germany to her new foster family-- the Hubermans. She had ridden the train there with her mother, however, Liesel’s younger brother dies on the journey. Though heartbroken over the loss of her family, Liesel slowly begins to adapt to her new life. She begins to bond with her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Huberman, and befriends Rudy, a neighborhood troublemaker. Hans soon discovers a tiny black book hidden by Liesel under her bed, and he slowly teaches her to read, igniting her passion for reading. Just as her life begins to finally settle down, a Jewish man named Max Vanderburg shows up at their door asking for protection. Though they are taking a tremendous risk by hiding a Jewish man from the Nazis, the Hubermans allow Max to stay in their basement. The Book Thief follows Liesel’s journey through the next three years of her life as she continues to ma...