Call Me Maria - Week of 02/23/15

Pages read: 0 - 48
Prompt: Do you like what you're reading? Why or why not?

    Truthfully, I am disliking the book more than I am enjoying it and a lot of it has to do with word choice. I think that because Mrs. Larson has been repeatedly talking about how important word choice is, I feel like now I have that mentality. Now word choice really affects what I read and whether I want to keep reading or not. In this book, the main character Maria, was born in Puerto Rico and her first language was Spanish. During her years in Puerto Rico, her mother taught her English, so when she moves to New York, she isn't completely lost, but in her letters and poems she writes in "Spanglish", which bothers me A LOT. I think that the Spanglish really bothers me because it just really takes away from the flow of the writing. In a lot of the lines where she adds a Spanish word, she says what it is in English, which to me, makes no sense because it is just adding repetition that makes the prose harder to enjoy.

    In this book, the writings jump all over the place, which again, looses the flow of the text. For example, on page 34 it is a writing piece describing all of the foods that her dad likes to eat, and she never says why its important or who was supposed to read that writing. In the poem after that, it is describing a girl named Whoopee, which at first I though was a dog, but later Maria says that Whoopee talks so then I made the connection that it was a girl. It was still very difficult to make the connection that Whoopee was Maria's friend and not someone she really admired because of the way Maria talked about Whoopee, like "Eyes, black, ebony, three A.M. on a clear night black..". I can see how the author would want to make a variety of writings, but I believe that there should be a connection between all of them and not just random writings that really throw me off.

    Now, I'm not just writing this blog to trash the book, because there are some parts that I have enjoyed from reading this. I really enjoyed how realistic the writing is written (besides the Spanglish) and how it really shows the personality of the character. So far in the book, it is very evident that Maria is extremely family-orientited and she shows this by explaining her worries for her mother and her excitement for her father. My favorite part so far,  is when Maria described her English teacher, Mr. Golden, by saying that his voice is like "chocolate ice cream, like warm honey, like the golden light of the sun at the end of a winter's day." I find this really cute and even laughable because it reminds of every romance movie ever. Again, it also shows Maria's personality and how she focuses on certain aspects of people like their voices.

Comments: Elenia, Steven, Gianna