"Response to Megan Cox Gurdon" Article- RRE

Drugs, smoking, abuse, drinking, "stomach clenching detail" and much much more dark stuff is what some people use to describe young adult literature. But what some people don't realize how great young adult literature can be for teenagers and how it can help teenagers get through a lot of the situations they encounter as a teenager.


Lots of teenagers deal with conflicts that authors introduce in these books so it can be good for teenagers to see that other teenagers/characters go through these things too and that they are not alone. In the article "Response to Megan Cox Gurdon" the author says: "If subjects like these are in young adult fiction books, it's to show that they are real, they have happened to others and they can be survived." This piece of evidence shows how a lot of teenagers feel so alone and young adult authors aren't trying to corrupt their youth they are trying to help. Some ma argue that young adult books are bad for kids to read because they are violent and inappropriate. "There isn't a young adult writer alive who is out there writing books to corrupt youth. No one writing about self harm is teaching how to self harm. No one writing about rape is providing instructions on how to rape or be raped." People think that young adult books are just meant to destroy teenagers but they don't get how the books aren't as bad as they are making them out to be,


All in all, teenagers should have young adult books in their lives because they show teenagers how they aren't alone and what they are going through others go through and that what they are going through is normal. Teachers should engourage teenagers to read young adult literature because it is helpful for teenagers and are good books to read.

Looking for Alaska RRE

The Labyrinth

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia…You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”  In the book Looking for Alaska By: John Green, a boy named Miles goes to boarding school and meets people that change his life, especially a girl named Alaska. Throughout the book I noticed that Alaska quoted the last words; “How will I get out of this Labyrinth!” Later in the book it became clear the Labyrinth symbolized life and things that happened in it.  Alaska tried to avoid things in life she did not want to think about which led her to a bad place. When this happens Miles tries to avoid the things in the “Labyrinth” he doesn’t want to think about but he eventually realizes that when Alaska ended up not continuing on in the “Labyrinth” when she tried to do this. Miles learns that you have to let the person you failed forgive you, you have to forgive yourself and you have to move on in life despite what happened.

Everyone makes mistakes.  They can be big or small, but you usually feel guilty. Sometimes the guilt is just too much and it effects how you feel about everyday life. In Looking for Alaska the main character, Miles, has to learn that you have to forgive and forget. An example of this is; “When she f*** up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where that led for her.” This is important because Miles realized that he needed to forget/get over her death and his part in it or the same thing would happen to him that happened to Alaska. Another piece of evidence that shows that Miles now knows that he has to get over/forgive himself and let himself forget her is “Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive me for my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know that she forgives me just as her mother forgives her.”  As Miles realizes this the book concludes because he learned a big lesson about forgiveness.

The primary them of Looking for Alaska  is forgiveness and continuing on in the Labyrinth of life no matter how much you don’t want to and you have to keep on continuing. This is a good lesson for teenagers because a lot of teenagers make mistakes and everyone handles it in a lot of different ways but Looking for Alaska shows how you need to move past your mistakes.