Book 4 - Jessica Cory

Dear Readers of Conversion,

The second semester of 2012, my senior year and last semester ever at St. Joan’s Academy, was a mess for everyone. By mess, I mean a truly unexplained, chaotic mania. With everyone applying for college and trying to get the best grades possible, there was no time to just relax and let out all the stress we had. According to a woman from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in result of all of the unusual stress, Conversion Disorder was taking over our school.

Before everyone knew what was causing the unnatural and different physical symptoms many of the girls at my school were suffering from, we called it the “Mystery Illness”. There were many different assumptions about what was happening, but no one could come to sense of what it was. During all of this excitement I was fighting for valedictorian with Fabina and trying to get into Harvard. When I got a 65 percent on a quiz in AP US History, you could understand my frustration. The only way I was going to make up for this awful grade is extra credit, so Ms. Slater offered me some if I did a “research paper on someone from the Salem panic who’s been either written out or turned into a composite by Mr. Miller” (132). This is how my confusion originally started.

The person I picked to write my paper about was Ruth, whose real name was Ann Putnam. Some people might think that Arthur Miller changed her name to avoid confusion between her and her mother, whose name is also Ann. Ms. Slater encouraged me to look past that and find the real reason for the change, which ended up not only being a name but her whole part in the trials. While learning more about Ann Putnam and what really happened, I was also learning more and more about the mystery illness. I found out that Danvers, where we currently lived, changed its name in 1752 from Salem Village. I also discovered that Ann Putnam admitted to faking everything and all the accusations were false. I managed to relate this to the mystery illness, and began to believe all of the girls suffering were faking just like the afflicted girls. Around this time I myself started suffering from the mystery illness. Even though I was pretty set in the fact that the other girls were faking their symptoms, I started to believe in it.

I guess I couldn’t help myself; it was like it was uncontrollable even though I knew it wasn’t real. This relates perfectly to Ann Putnam, and what she went through. The difference is Ann knew she was faking from the start and she did it to protect Abby from getting in trouble for lying. But eventually, she couldn’t help but lie and make things up about the “witches” that were accused.

After everything was settled and the mystery illness was named conversion disorder, I still felt weird. When I went to Emma, my best friend’s, house her mother said something extremely odd. She said Emma’s “Prone to spells”(393). What was that supposed to mean? It was so weird that it made me wonder if the conversation I had with her was even real. After graduation when everything was normal again and I was about to leave for Harvard, I look out my bedroom window and see a tiny yellow bird. From the research I did, I found that there was a tiny yellow bird the afflicted girls said they always saw with the witches. 

The tiny yellow bird got me thinking about what Emma’s mother had told me. All of these weird things had to have meant something. Maybe Ann admitted to faking it because she truly thought she was, but she wasn’t. Maybe witches are what caused all the chaos and Emma or her mother were the witches. Or maybe I’m just overthinking this and its the conversion disorder.

Sincerely,

Colleen Rowley

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Jessica Cory

Bell 7

Mr. Coats

11/25/14

Five Reasons Why Stanley Yalnats is a Good Kid

The way Louis Sachar portrays the main character of the book Holes demonstrates a lot about how he wants the message to come across to the readers. Stanley Yalnats, the main character, is an innocent kid caught up in a bad situation. He and his whole family blame their bad luck on his “no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfather”. Stanley always say that he is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here are five reasons why Stanley Yelnats is actually a good kid:

#1: He doesn’t lie in Court about what happened.

Stanley was accused of stealing Clyde Livingston’s shoes. What really happened is a pair of shoes fell on top of him and hit him in the head. He didn’t think anything of it so he just kept them and thought that is was good luck. On his way home he was seen with the shoes and therefore was accused of stealing them. When he went to court, he told the judge that the shoes fell from the sky and hit him. Of course the judge thought this was crazy and he was accused guilty. He could have just said that he found them on the sidewalk and it would have sounded my believable.

#2: He writes to his mom from camp.

On his way to Camp Green lake, Stanley imagines it will be like the summer camp he always wanted to go to but wasn’t wealthy enough for. His mother thought this was how it was going to be too. When Stanley gets there and finds out it is nothing like that. He writes to his mother and makes up stories about what he did that day. Stanley does this because he doesn’t want his mom to worry about him.

#3: He gave X-Ray the item he found in his hole.

The rule is, if you find something worth bringing to the Warden’s attention, you will get the rest of the day off. It was very rare for someone to actually find something, but one day Stanley found a tube with the initials KB. He gave it to X-Ray to turn in because X-Ray had been at the camp for much longer. Stanley told X-Ray he should turn it in first thing tomorrow so he could get the whole day off instead of the little that was left of the current day. This was very nice of Stanley to do because he could have gotten a whole day off.

#4: He took the blame for the stolen sunflower seeds.

One day when Mr. Sir was filling the boys Canteens, Magnet snuck into his truck and stole his bad of sunflower seeds. When Mr. Sir drove off, the sunflower seeds were passed around. When they were tossed to Stanley the bags spilled out. When Mr. Sir noticed that his sunflower seeds were missing, he turned around to go see who took them. He saw the sack by Stanley’s hole. When he asked Stanley who took them, he said it was him, because he didn’t want to get Magnet in trouble.

#5: He refused to leave without Zero.

When Stanley’s lawyer came to Camp Green Lake to pick him up because it turned out he was innocent, Stanley refused to leave without Zero. His lawyer said that there is no way that he would come with them because they are not in charge of him. Stanley wouldn’t stop arguing it because he knew it wasn’t right for Zero to stay there. When they find out that Zero doesn’t have any files in the system, it was okay for him to come along with them.

All of these reasons prove that Stanley Yelnats is a good kid. It shows that if you are positive and try to overcome and make light of the bad situations you are in, you can find tons of happiness. Even though it seemed like only bad things happened to Stanley, he was still a nice person and was good to everyone.

Blog #5

Jessica Cory                                                                     

If a book is considered non-fiction, I think that all of the facts need to be as accurate as possible. This is because it’s labeled as non-fiction which means a true story and people reading non-fiction books are most likely expecting something that is fully the truth. I think that half-truths are okay as long as the writer classifies it as that and not a non-fiction book. I think that it’s okay for Frey and other memoirists to bend the truth to tell their stories, but only if they let the readers know that is what they are doing. I think that David Shields is right in certain situations. I think that it makes it easier, for those who like a specific genre, to find a book that they like if there are lines between genres. I think that we do need to label things non-fiction and fiction, because people reading these books might be looking for facts, and they won’t be able to know if the facts are accurate without the labels. I also think that there should be an in-between for those authors that want to use a real event that has happened and make it more interesting in their own way. Personally it doesn’t matter to me, but I think we should respect other reader’s preferences.

What Is a Book?

Jessica Cory

A book is a different world. I say this for more than one reason. The book is a different world for the author because they get to write about however they think the world should be. Maybe they will write about how the world shouldn’t be. The point is they get to make up and express any type of world in their writing that they feel the readers should learn about or be introduced to. In my opinion, the authors that can take one small idea/event and turn it into a huge made up story are so talented. I think it’s amazing that they can make up their on dialog and make it sound so real and like it has actually happened.

The other reason I think a book is a different world is for the reader. This is because they can totally forget about the real world or their world and only concentrate on the books world. I think the book being a different world can pull readers in and get them interested in the story that isn’t even real. The readers find joy in reading something completely made up by the author. I find it very interesting that the writer has the ability to get the reader’s attention for that long.

On the other hand, I think that the way you read the book doesn’t really matter. I feel like if it has the same words in the same order it’s the same thing. Personally I like being able to flip pages when I’m reading and really know what page I’m on. But I also know that a lot of people don’t like doing that. I have never actually read a book on a kindle or an iPad but I don’t think I would like it because whenever I stare at a screen for too long I get a headache.