Safety

I don't know where to begin. Living Dead Girl is too horrifying for words. I can't find the right words because everything would feel like it is trivializing Alice's story. It gives you the feeling of all the air being sucked out of your body while being kicked in the stomach and back simultaneously. It's something so brutal that you want to scream as loud as you can to have some sort of release but you can't make any noise. This was a terrible and sad story. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to be like "why didn't she run away?" and part of me thinks that too but at the same time this girl has been so traumatized and scared and everything that once was has been beaten out of her. She's just a shell of who she was. There was a recent article which I, unfortunately, didn't read but I skimmed it and it said that people who are in terrible situations such as abusive relationships often lose the will to leave. They've become so defeated and broken that escaping has gone beyond them. God, this book was brutal.

I finished ALmost Home and while I can appreciate the stories I wish we had gotten to know the characters a little more...that they had revealed themselves more while telling their stories. Eeyore's story was terrible but at least you had some hope in the end. These are very broken kids and sometimes you can't come back from that kind of brokeness. And I wanted to knock out that teacher of Rusty's...what a predator.

I know that sad and upsetting stories have high appeal to teens. I haven't read A Child Called It but I think I'm going to have to at some point. I think part of the appeal is that adolescence is a very emotionally volatile time...everything seems to felt to the utmost extreme and these books allow them to give into those emotional extremes. I think it's hard in class sometimes because we're not reading these books as teens, we're reading them as adults and sometimes forget that we might have a different viewpoint than teens.

Anyway, I made it through After School Nightmare. Manga and your backwards reading...how your frustrate me!! Seriously, I have a really hard time with it and it always makes me feel like I'm going to miss something important in the plot.

Afterschool Nightmare was SO weird.