Reader's Journal #5 Slob by Ellen Potter

Dear Mrs. Zrihen,
I have nearly finished the book Slob by Ellen Potter. Here was a passage I really enjoyed on page 92:


“Nine minutes of standing outside in the frigid cold in my gym shorts, two and a half minutes of walking to the lunch closet. At the twelfth minute, I discovered that my entire lunch sack was gone.
“In its place was a note. It said:
“NEXT TIME I LEAVE THE CLASS, COUNT TO 20, THEN FOLLOW ME.”


I enjoyed this passage because without this passage, there wouldn’t be any suspense and mysteriousness. This passage is significant because it raises the stakes in the story. We don’t know who wrote the note or why. We think it’s Mason who wrote it and that Owen is about to catch him. Another passage that I liked was this on page 124:


“I knew it was silly. I’d been right behind Mason so I knew that he didn’t have time to rifle through my lunch, but I wanted to check anyway. I unrolled the tote bag and opened it up.
“That’s right. You guessed it.
“My frickin’ Oreo cookies were gone.
“So it wasn’t Mason after all.”


I liked this passage because it put a twist in the story. Up until now in the story we thought it was Mason who had been stealing the cookies and now we know he isn’t. That leaves Owen back to square one because now he doesn’t know who is stealing his cookies.
One before reading strategy I used was understanding the last part that I read so that I would have a better understanding about what the next part would be about. The other strategy I used was to skim and scan for figurative language. The two during reading strategies were to understand what I was reading and to understand the suspense and hard words. The after reading strategies I used were to review what I’ve read to check for understanding and to remember what I’ve read.
The genre of this book is realistic fiction. The genre characteristics, characterizations, motive, protagonist, antagonist, foil, conflict, point of view, author’s purpose and perspective I have done in my last Reader’s Journal. The setting for the story has not changed. The exposition was covered in my last Reader’s Journal. In the rising action, what happens is Owen finds that his whole lunch is taken and finds the note. So he follows Mason when he leaves the room but doesn’t count to twenty. He sees Mason running away from him so Owen starts chasing Mason. While he’s chasing Mason, Owen bumps into his friend Izzy. Eventually, Izzy and Owen get caught and are sent back to their classrooms. Owen decides to look in his lunch to see if the Oreo cookies are still there, but they were gone. So he realized that Mason wasn’t the thief. When Owen gets home, he works on Nemesis and figures out that what he needs is a retro TV magazine to get it to work right. He asks Jeremy (his sister) if her friend can let Owen borrow her retro TV magazines. She and Owen finally make a deal that he will give her his boy clothes and he gets to use the magazines for two weeks. Then they see that Nemesis starts working. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
The tone of the story is very kind of comic. The mood is happy. I haven’t gotten to the moral of the story yet.
I would rate this book five stars out of five because it is funny and has a lot of suspense, and I love funny stories.
Sincerely,


Your Student,


Michael Heskiel