Assignment #2- Emma Shadwick- iRead

I used to be an avid reader and almost always carried a book around with me. However, high school has made it increasingly harder every year to find time to read for fun. The only time I get now is basically on vacation. My normal routine is I will stock up on books at the airport before take off. Some books I have read in the past 12 months include…

• The Outsider by Stephen King
• Queen of Kentucky by Alecia Whitaker
• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The only book of this bunch that I put down was The Girl on the Train. I was first attracted to this book because the basic plot line is about a woman that goes missing. Mysteries are my favorite genre so I thought I would enjoy this book. However, the way it was written made it hard for me to follow. It would switch between the POV’s of the missing woman right before she went missing and a year prior to when she went missing and the POV’s of the narrator right before she witnessed the woman for the last time and a year prior when her life looked very different. It was difficult to arrange the facts in my mind when they were presented in this way, so I put the book down. The Outsider, by Stephen King on the other hand, I could hardly put down. It is also a mystery about a little boy murdered in a small town in Oklahoma. All the evidence points to a little league coach who is beloved by everyone in the town. However, the coach is found to have an airtight alibi. The plot thickens when the detective discovers that the real culprit is an “outsider” who feeds off of others sadness and shape shifts. Finally, I read the Queen of Kentucky recently. It follows the transition in a young girls life from farm girl to city girl as she enters her first year in high school and struggles to fit in. I learned a big lesson from this book because as Ricki Jo (main character) tried to fit in, she ended up making a lot of fake friends and losing the few real friends she had before. This can happen to anyone if they aren’t careful. I always keep a lesson I learned from this book in the back of my head which is: don’t let the idea of popularity cloud your judgement.