Brittany’s Comments (group member since Jan 20, 2010)

Brittany’s comments from the UNC Middle School Lit group.

Own your mistakes. Don't make excuses.

Patricia wrote: "I must admit that I was bothered by the fact that Pullman added to and changed the text of the Bible.

On a different note, like many other people have mentioned, I thought the daemons were very ..."

Here's my theory: I think that the parent's daemons mate when the child is conceived, and then is born at the same time as the child. It's not an arbitrary pairing because daemons are souls and therefore they have to be with their human from birth (or conception or however you want to look at it).

Natalie wrote: "I think the adults were right about the dust, and Lyra was wrong. I think she behaved rather immaturely when she based her opinion that dust is a good thing on the little experience she has with i..."

I've read the other two books, and Lyra is not wrong about Dust. The problem is that adults believe that Dust is evil because it doesn't really start being drawn to children and their daemons until they hit puberty and start having sexual thoughts and desires (which is perfectly natural, normal, and healthy...not sinful as many people in the book believe). And why is knowledge/enlightenment a bad thing? Finally, I'm pretty sure he calls them daemons as an ironic reference to the word "demon," which has very negative connotations, yet daemons are actually their souls (in this world, souls just live outside of the body), which are generally thought to be the part of us worth saving.

Patricia wrote: "One thing that I constantly questioned was what time period the story takes place. Part of the time, I felt that it occurred in the past (but a past with a great bit of technology). Other times I..."

This book actually explores the idea of parallel universes, and the idea is that this is what our present-day world could be. In the second one, they actually go back and forth between our world and theirs. It's pretty cool actually.

This book is NOT anti-religion. It's anti-institution, and cautions against blind acceptance of authority. Everyone makes such a big deal of the fact that this book encourages children to be "heathens" and teaches that religion is bad, but that's only when viewed through a very narrow lens. When you look at the message of this book in a broader sense, I think it is one of the best books out there for young adults in terms of teaching them to question things; to not take everything at face value. Which, I would argue, is a very useful thing to learn. Imagine if we all grew up believing every word out of politicians' mouths. Or, look how in the book when no one questions the Magesterium they're allowed to get away with the horrendous crime of severing children from their daemons to protect them from Dust, which by the way is not evil but "enlightenment" as you really learn in the 3rd book. They know that Dust leads to independent thinking, and in their society they don't want that, so they label it as evil. Anyway, my main point is that this book is not teaching children not to be religious, but it encourages them to believe more in religion as a spiritual guidance and not as an institution that controls their lives.

Just thought I'd add that I took the quiz and it says my daemon would be a Wolf:

Your WOLF DAEMON shows that you are solitary, ferocious, and often intimidating, but not without your sufficient loyalty and poise. People tend to misunderstand you, but you prefer your own company, anyway.

I could see that. Wolves are almost as awesome as cats.

A cat, because I often compare myself to a cat anyway: I'm shy, yet affectionate, playful, curious, and enjoy being alone.

"The enemy, far from trying to repel him, welcomed him in, so he could be thoroughly entrapped before they destroyed him. Mazer is at least taking into account the fact that by now they would have learned to respect me, thought Ender. And that does buy me time." pg. 293-294

I love this. This was the moment when I really realized that it was probably real. Before this, I had had brief thoughts that maybe...but I always brushed them off. But here I was like, oh no, he's really been fighting them and he's going to blow up their whole civilization and poor Ender won't be able to live with himself afterwards. This quote pretty much sums up the whole of his life for me. He's been lied to and manipulated for years, and he truly believes what they tell him, and now it all comes to a head in this one moment. He knows what the enemy is thinking,and admires them, but he doesn't realize that it's a real enemy. It's just a game. Until he kills them all.

I first read this book in 4th grade, so some things I remembered and some things I had completely forgotten. I'm the type of person who gets really attached to characters in a book, so I have to believe that Jonas and Gabe made it to a family Elsewhere and lived happily ever after, or I would probably cry. I remembered that the ending was ambiguous, so this time around I was looking for more clues as to what actually happened...but again, for my sanity, I have to believe that he lived. I heard at one point that there was a sequel, but I also heard that it wasn't even about Jonas and that it wasn't that great, so I never read it...I'll stick to my happy ending.