"An Abundance of Katherines"- Reading Response

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

Colin Singleton of "An Abundance of Katherines", a book by John Green, is a child prodigy who has only ever dated girls named Katherine. Nineteen of them, in fact, and every single one has dumped him. When his most recent Katherine girlfriend breaks his heart, Colin's best friend Hassan decides to take him on a road trip. The two end up staying in Gunshot, Tennessee with a girl Colin's age named Lindsey and her mother, Hollis. At the beginning of the story, they are just friends. Colin is still in love with Katherine #19, and Lindsey has a boyfriend, whose name also happens to be Colin. Later in the book, Lindsey and Colin learn more about each other and become a lot closer, then at they very end they actually end up dating. Lindsey and Colin's relationship develops a lot throughout the story.

At the beginning of the story, Colin and Lindsey are just friends, and have a lot keeping them apart. For example, Colin, being a child prodigy and a boy who has only dated Katherines, spends all of his time reading and moping about K19 (his most recent heartbreaker).  "The house smelled... like K19's basement... [it] brought him back to a time when she loved him... and his gut ached anew." This is shows that when he first meets Lindsey, he is obviously still in love with K19. Also, since at first in was an accident that he only dated Kathrines, he had unintentionally developed a preference for them and pretty much thought about them all the time. He even was working on a theorem to predict his relationships so he wouldn't get dumped by a Katherine yet again. In his mind he could never love a Lindsey. Another example of what keeps Lindsey and Colin apart is Lindsey's boyfriend, also named Colin (or, as Hassan and Colin Singleton called him "TOC"- The Other Colin). In the beginning of the story, Lindsey is very in love with him. She is always ditching Colin and Hassan to go hang out with him.

Towards the end of the story, Colin and Lindsey's relationship develops a lot more. They begin to trust each other. For instance, Lindsey says she has a "private habit" of biting the inside of her thumb, but she still does it in front of Colin. Another big clue that they are getting closer is Lindsey shows Colin a secret hiding place of hers, and she lets him sit there and talk with her. She hadn't even shown this place to her boyfriend. Also, Colin begins to care about Lindsey more and less about Katherines. Very near to the end of the story, Colin and Hassan catch TOC cheating on Lindsey with her best friend. When he finds them, "For reasons he didn't understand, Colin felt a pulsing rage..." This, I think, is when Colin begins to realize he has a crush on Lindsey. 

At the end of the story, Colin finds Lindsey in her hiding place, and they both realize they like each other. When Colin and Lindsey first met, they kept their distance from each other because they were in love with other people. They slowly become closer and closer until finally they end up dating. This shows that their relationship developed a lot from the start of the book to the end.

"Free?"- Summer Reading Response

The book "Free?" is a collection of short stories, each written by a different author, all based around one major theme. This theme is human rights; more specifically human rights laws, seeing that every story is based off of one of these laws. The most interesting thing about this book is how in some of the stories, the theme is not clear until the very end. I think the purpose of the book was to have the reader reflect back on each of the stories and really think about how it relates to the theme and maybe even our lives. 

The theme of "Free?" is clearly human rights, but in some of the short stories this theme is unclear until the end. For example, one of the stories, "Prince Francis", seems to be about a boy called Francis who is seeing his friends being interviewed about their lives and families for a school project, then he himself is interviewed and he mentions an imaginary country that he and his father made up, but the interviewer is skeptical about it. But, at the end of the chapter/story, just like at the end of every chapter, the true meaning of the story is revealed, and the book tells us which human rights article the story relates to. At the end of "Prince Francis", it is revealed that the article it relates to is "Article 15: We all have the right to belong to a country". This explanation of the story gives me, the reader, a chance to look back on it and realize that the interviewer being skeptical about Francis' made-up country may be a metaphor for this basic human right.

Every story in "Free?" has a specific human rights law that it relates to. The law is mentioned at the end of each story, giving the reader a chance to reflect on how it relates to that story. I think this was the purpose of the whole collection, to relate and reflect on each story and how it relates back to the theme.