Saturday, August 6, 2011

Blog Review # 3: Coming of Age SwissMist

R. Powell, "SwissMist" New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
Genre: Coming of Age.

Annotation: This fictional story is about a young boy named Milo Bastion and the story relates a major part of his life which is his adolescence age. The story started when Milo was eleven years old in fifth-grade and ends when Milo turns sixteen at the onset of eleventh grade. He goes through a lot of struggle which includes dealing with his parents divorce, changing schools, dealing with loneliness and playing sports.As he goes through these problems, he is given advice on how to make it in life. His mum taught him some skills on how to catch a ball at an early age which he found useful later as he played sports. His dad also shared with him some philosophical insights on how to make it in life. To the dad, the only way to make it in life was to always seek the truth. The person that made the greatest impact in Milo's life however, was his fifth-grade teacher Ms. Swinford.
Ms. Swinford was a favorite of the fifth-graders. She loved to sing the song "The happy Wanderer" and told tales about her childhood on a farm in Wenatchee. She told them stories about her travels to Switzerland and showed them cool power point slides of Swiss villages and mountains. She made such a huge impact on Milo that he never stopped thinking of her as he journeyed from city to city with his mum. Ms. Swinford gave him a book titled "Synonyms" which he referenced whenever he was going through his ups and downs. The surprising twist to the story happened when Milo found out years later that Ms. Swinfors was such a big phony after all. She never went to Switzerland and had made up all those stories which the the fifth-graders so much enjoyed. Milo was hurt by this revelation but he handled the situation well because he had already gone through a lot.However at the end of the story he got a surprise about his friend Jastin Spitters. Jastin had lived his adolescent life as a criminal and Milo and his mum thought Jastin was going to end up in jail but Jastin actually ended well.

Nomination: I will nominate this book for young readers because there are lots of issues in the story that they can relate to.

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