"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.