Three Day Road Blog

There were many key scenes in the novel Three Day Road that helped to shape the different character developments and how the book as a whole played out. There was one scene in the novel that I found to be really keep in the character development and I feel that it really connected to the rest of the book too.


There are a couple parts to this scene that I feel are very important. Here is an excerpt from the first part of the the scene. Elijah’s reputation is growing, I know, and Elijah’s vanity being fed makes him content and happy.(119) This is when all of the soldiers are being told that Xavier is going to be sniping behind them trying to take out the “Phantom Sniper”. Elijah is warning everyone to keep their heads down while Xavier is sniping because he might mistake them for a Fritz. This is when Xavier feels that he’s sort of falling out of the loop, and people are starting to forget about him because of Elijah’s actions.


After that encounter with Elijah and the other’s in their group Xavier was almost determined to do something great to try to improve reputation among the group and then maybe he will become as popular as Elijah and people will start being nicer to him. Elijah and Xavier spent many days surveying the land where the Fritz would be and trying to figure out the position of the phantom sniper. Then one night when they were done searching for the phantom sniper. Xavier was wide awake trying to figure out the position the sniper had to be in order to kill Sean Patrick. Then finally an idea hit Xavier, the sniper had to be in No Man’s Land. The moment Xavier and Elijah woke up they went and told McCaan that they thought they had an idea of where the sniper was, so Xavier and Elijah went to their nests and waited for a sign of him.

While the sun is starting to set behind Elijah and Xavier, Elijah decides to check the accuracy of his rifle by shooting the bloated belly of a horse. Almost right after Elijah shoots the horse, Xavier notices a corpse about fifteen feet away who then shoots at Elijah and wood splinters hit him. Xavier then steadies his gun and takes the shot. When he looks up from the nest all he sees is the gun sitting at an odd angle and believes that the Phantom Sniper is now gone for good. “That was their Phantom Sniper,” Elijah says with awe. “the one who killed Sean Patrick. He was hunting us too,” ... “We will go out there tonight and learn his tricks,” Elijah says. “We will get you a souvenir of your first great kill.” After that point when Xavier killed the Phantom Sniper, he started to gain a little more respect from his group, and people started to recognize him as a killer and a man that you can trust with a gun if you’re in need.

Boy in the Moon Blog

A. When Ian Brown mentions L’Arche in his novel “Boy in the Moon” I feel that he covers all aspects of what you might see at L’Arche when you go visit it. With this quote he talks about one of the people that he meets that that is fully capable of doing things like buying breakfast, but he says “her body would never be quite ready for her mind.” The full quote goes as follows, “One of L’Arche’s residents was there already, a young thin girl with a high, stalling voice, a stammer—as if her body would never be quite ready for her mind. She, however, managed to buy breakfast for her entire house.” Ian Brown also mentions the opinions other people have about the L’Arche community in his novel. “Le Cardinal’s conclusion surprised him. L’Arche produced a collective intelligence that was greater than the sum of its parts; interaction between the able and the disabled produced points of view that were more sophisticated than either group reported on its own.” I believe that this is a good reference to include in the novel because he’s showing other people’s opinions and how it’s affected their lives too, and that whether you are disabled or not, you are still equal to the person sitting next to you.


B. I have always thought that having a child or even a relative that is profoundly disabled would be really tough, not being able to properly communicate with them or what feelings they have or their thoughts on anything. However Ian Brown has really changed my out-look on that. In his novel he has truly showed me that even though you can’t communicate with someone through one language, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to communicate at all. Ian and Walker have their own language that they use to communicate with called “Clicking.” When Ian told Vanier at one of the L’Arche meetings that the only way he could somewhat communicate with his son was through clicks. Vanier had this to say, “He’s clicking, and you’re clicking, and I call that communication, Vanier said. You’re vulnerable to him, he’s vulnerable to you. You’re not doing something for him. You’re just with him. Clicking. I like that expression. So when you’re with Walker and you’re clicking, you’re grateful for one another.” I thought that it was very good that Ian Brown put that quote into his novel. It really helped to show that even if you can’t communicate with someone in your main language, you can just make up your own language.



C. 1. What made you decide to write a book about your disabled son Walker?
2. What was your initial reaction when you first attended L’Arche?

The Delicate Storm

The book that I read was “The Delicate Storm” by Giles Blunt.

One of the detectives in the novel was named John Cardinal. As many of the characters said in the novel Cardinal was very serious about his work. He would never let anything interfere with his work life that was from his private life. One of the other detectives that he worked with Lise Delorme said in the novel “I don’t think I have ever heard him once talk about his wife or his daughter. He just doesn’t like to talk about it.” Cardinal was called to the scene when there was a severed arm – with no hand – found near Algonquin Bay. He was less than pleased when he found out that the arm belonged to a US citizen and the Mounties were called in to help with the case. Cardinal felt that he should only work with people that he knew well, and especially people that he worked well with, and the RCMP were not either of those kinds of people to him. Cardinal was able to get the job done even if he did have to work with the RCMP.


The first clue that showed up in the novel was a severed arm with no hand. There had been an unusual warm front in January that awoke bears, so they were the first suspect but they were soon ruled out of the picture. Throughout further investigation they found out that the body belonged to a former CIA agent who worked in Montreal in 1970 during the French Canadian separatist movement that turned violent. Cardinal finally reached a point where every clue led to a dead end, until a doctor from Toronto went missing one night and her naked body was found in an isolated part of town. The police were able to link up the two murders because of the rare AB blood type that was found in the doctor’s office and in the first victim’s car. They began to believe that the perpetrator was injured and need medical assistance. In order to solve the murders the two detectives, John Cardinal and Lise Delorme, have to travel to Montreal to try to reconstruct events that happened over three-decades ago in hopes that one of their interviewees is the killer.


“First came the warmth. Three weeks after New Year’s and the thermometer did what it never does in January in Algonquin Bay: it rose above the freezing mark. Within a matter of hours the streets were shiny and black with melted snow.” This quote appealed to me because it was one of the opening lines in the book. I felt that right from the beginning the author was putting you on the edge when he says “Three weeks after New Year’s and the thermometer did what it never does in January in Algonquin Bay:” I thought this was a good piece of writing because he pauses briefly and then he continues on with his sentence. It kind of left you on the edge wondering what he was going to say next.

“Shep!” Bergeron waded through the fog, one hand out before him like a blind man. “Shep! For God’s sake, can it, willya?” I thought that this was another great piece of writing from the book because this was the scene before a part of the first body was found in Algonquin Bay. It was discovered by a man who lived near where the body was found he was working on some snowmobiles for some customers of his. His dog had gone out near the lake and started barking because it had found a severed arm. So Bergeron told his dog to be quiet and when his dog kept barking he went over to see what the big deal was. Turns out the big deal was part of the dead body.

“They’d make you wait, anyways, no matter how many of them there were,” Stan said. “It’s a class thing. Class not only must exist, it must be seen to exist. Making you wait is their way of saying, ‘I’m important and you’re not.’”
 I found that this was another important part in the novel because this is one of the only times that we ever hear about Cardinal’s personal life. He takes his dad (Stan) to the doctor for a checkup with the doctor because Stan believes that he is fit to drive and Cardinal disagrees with him. When they are in the waiting room Stan is getting mad at the doctor’s office because he has to wait even though they were on time for their appointment. This gets Stan extremely upset and Cardinal then has to try to calm him down when the doctor comes out.

Ted Kennedy Eulogy

There are many ways that multimedia enhanced Barack Obama’s eulogy for Ted Kennedy. The cameraman filming the eulogy used some still-frames and some moving-frames to try to better enhance the eulogy for the viewer. When Obama began talking about Ted Kennedy as a young boy and growing up as the youngest child the camera started showing pictures of him as a baby and then slowly making it’s way through his life until they reached one picture of him and his brothers. They even showed a soundless video of him and his brothers talking together, all in suits and ties at a formal event. The cameraman also used technology to enhance the eulogy by showing the audience several times. Each of those times they would show some of the well-known faces in the audience of bold political figures. Such as Bill Clinton and George Bush.


As Barack Obama mentioned in his eulogy Ted Kennedy had a very good attitude towards serving his people well and trying his best to make them all happy. After the tragic 9/11 incident Ted Kennedy made it his duty to write individual letters to all of the families who lost a loved one in the attack on the World Trade Center. Every year following the attacks on September 11th he would send another letter to the families apologizing for their lose and asking if they needed any help with anything. He even went to some families homes and played with their children some of the times. Ted was also the father to his niece and nephew their father/his brother, died at an early age. So he took on the responsibilities of raising those kids as well as raising his own. This just proves that Ted Kennedy had a very good attitude towards service.


There was some contrast during Obama’s eulogy for Ted Kennedy, especially when they were showing the former presidents in the audience. When there are 3 former presidents at your funeral and the current one reading the eulogy it is a real honor. Bill Clinton and George Bush were even sitting next to each other, which is a great sign of respect. The eulogy wasn’t all serious, there was some humor put into it which was able to lighten the mood a little bit. The majority of the eulogy was praising Ted Kennedy for all of the good things that he did in his life. One quote that Obama said about praising Ted was “There was the time he courted Orrin Hatch’s support for the Children’s Health Insurance Program by having his Chief of Staff serenade the Senator with a song Orrin had written himself; the time he delivered shamrock cookies on a china plate to sweeten up a crusty Republican colleague.” Obama was showing people that there was a lot more to love about Ted than there was to hate about him and I think he did a very good job of doing just that.

Pendragon: The Merchant of Death

One of the books that I read over the summer was Pendragon: The Merchant of Deat, by D.J. Machale. This book tells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Pendragon. He lives a normal life with his mom, dad, sister named Shannon and a Golden Retriever named Marley. All of this changed on the day of his basketball championship game. Bobby's Uncle Press, came to his house the minute before he was about to leave for his basketball game and said he needed Bobby's help. He ended up taking Bobby to a very skuzzy place in New York with an old run down subway station. They went into the station and used a portal that Uncle Press called a "flume". This "flume" took Bobby to a land called Denduron, which was a very unstable territory. Everywhere he loked there was chaos. Once Bobby came to his sense that he was no longer in the old New York subway station anymore he realied why Uncle Press neede him. Bobby was meant to save Denduron.


That author did a good job of developing the characters in the novel Pendragon. All of the characters pregressed gradually in the novel, and started to grow up and became smarter as their adventures continued, and became harder. I found the author's use of diction to the be very fascinating. The author was able to do a spectacualr job of describing the characters at key points in the novel. As the reader you almost felt like the character was standing in your room and looking right at you. You could picture every little detail of the character from the way their hair looked to what they were wearing on their feet.


"Bobby, you've known me all your life. Have you ever seen me like this?" I didn't need to answer. Something was definitely up. "Then you know how serious this is," he said with absolute finality. Bobby's uncle said this just after Bobby had finished tellin gus that he has possibly the coolest uncle in the world and is almost never serious. This appealed to me because it shows that Bobby's cool uncle isn't always too calm. "It felt like I was floating on a magic carpet that knew exactly where it was taking me. There were sounds, too. They were soft notes, like from a tuning fork. All different notes. Pretty notes." This is Bobby's explanation of when he goes through the "flume" and then lands in Denduron. I liked this because it shows the diction the author used to describe certain events in the novel. "That's when Uncle Press struck. He hurled the spear like an Olympic Javelin thrower. The deadly missile flew straight at the quig and stabbed into it's open mouth!" This is Bobby's first run in with a quig. A quig is described as a hog like animal on earth but it's very deadly and kills many people on Denduron despite it being so small.