Slice of Life 3/1

Hello. My name is Etti. I am in eighth grade and this year I have studied History of Cooking, Tattoos and Exotic Animal Care (which sounded way less stupid in my head). I enjoy eating small children in my spare time.

I watched the animal shift his weight between his three-toed feet and I wondered how I never realized how prehistoric he is. His armor shifted and he opened his mouth to chew strawberries and green bananas, halved but unpeeled. He is a Greater One-Horned Rhino, or rhinoceros unicornis, and he is behind bars wide enough for a human to slip through. The keeper continued to toss fruit into a mouth big enough to hold my entire head. He has no incisors or front teeth at all, only molars to grind his strictly herbivorous diet. The black and white rhinos, found in Africa, are much more aggressive than this species. His horn is small and rounded, which unfortunately means that it is worth thousands of dollars, and his species is threatened by poachers. He is lined up against the bars and his keeper rubs his head. She has trained him to hold still while a veterinarian takes a blood sample, and for a wild animal, he is incredibly cooperative. I stepped up to his heavy, gray body and felt his skin. It is rough and dry, but the crease between the plates of armor is soft. His feet moved slightly, but he stayed focused on his meal. He is still wild, but he is calm by nature. It is hard to say if he did not know that we were there or simply just did not care, but I am amazed that I got to touch this bizarre, endangered animal.

Slice of Life #6

I think that there should be a mental health check before you can enter the school on EXPO. You would think that the only people that come are parents and grandparents, but I'm sure that there are a few random strangers that no one will claim to be related to. EXPO shouldn't be such a big deal anyway. I'm never sure why people care so much. There are always a few types of weirdos that I can count on, such as someone who will definitely tell me about my unit and someone who will definitely tell me wrong information about my unit. Visitors who loiter for too long, family members that block everything from others, strangers who want to take a picture of me, I've seen it all in my eight EXPOs, and I have given up on expecting normalcy.

Holes by Louis Sachar

This week I read Holes. I have seen the movie, but this was my first time reading the book. It is about a boy who is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and he is sent to Camp Green Lake, where his only job is to dig one hole per day, five feet deep and five feet wide. Eventually he realizes that the Warden is looking for something.
I liked it. There was a lot more to the story than just digging holes, and there were flashbacks to when the camp was a town. All of the story lines tied together at the end. The book was pretty well written, not great, but I had no complaints about the writing style. Some of the supporting characters were one-dimensional, but that didn't bother me so much. Overall, I liked this book.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

This week I read Code Name Verity, which is about female members of the Resistance in WWII, one a pilot and the other a spy. The story is told as each girl is writing an account of the events so far. There are a lot of suspenseful events and plot twists as you hear the story from both perspectives and it all ties together really nicely at the end.
I liked this book. It definitely had flaws, but I liked the writing style and the characters were well developed. The format was really cool. I liked how it was told in a realistic way and the author created a fairly accurate representation of written accounts. My main problem was that there were parts in the middle that got a little slow and there were a lot of military terms that weren't explained very well. Overall, I liked it and would recommend it to people. The surprise twist ending was definitely a surprise.