Letter essay 9 T3 April 3 2015

Dear class,

The book that i just finished is A Long Walk To Water by Linda sue park. Its is a quick read at 128 pages but is definitely worth a try. It keeps you turning the pages until you finally reach the end. It give you a little background knowledge on Sudan while entertaining you the whole way through. The main reason why I choose this book is because I heard a lot about it and how good it was so I decided to give it a try. A lot of my friends read it too so that encouraged me to read it.
A Long Walk to Water is a creative non-fiction story about the life of one of the Lost Boys from South Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War. The primary character, Salva Dut, relates his life from a pre-teenager wandering with groups of other war victims from refugee camp to refugee camp, and then to his new home with his new family in Rochester, New York as a young adult, and finally back to his family of origin in Sudan. Ultimately, Salva creates an organization that digs wells, the ultimate gift of life, for small Sudanese villages.
The book opens with Salva daydreaming during Arabic class. Jolted back to reality by gunfire, Salva obeys his teachers who say not to run back home to their villages but to run for the bush instead. Throughout most of the novel, Salva and the companions he meets along the way always move away from sounds of armies. The young boys have to fear not only for their lives, but also being forced to fight for either side of the combatants in this Second Sudanese Civil War.
The first group of people whom Salva meets up with abandon him as he sleeps in a barn. However, all is not lost, because he meets an older Dinka (his tribe) woman who feeds him peanuts. When the fighting gets too close and she decides she must leave, she finds a group of wanderers for him to join.
I wish that Linda Sue park made the book longer because it was such a great book but finished it so fast. I liked how the book really brought out the main character Salva through his actions.
The scene that was interesting to me was when the author said… “Each time, Salva would think of his family and his village, and he was somehow able to keep his wounded feet moving forward, one painful step at a time” (p. 41). The reason why I chose this paragraph is because It shows how strong of a person Salva is and also explains how much he cares about his family.
If I were to rate this book out of ten it would be an 8.5 because it was a very well done book but was just too short and I thought the author could have gone farther with this book. Other than that A Long Walk To Water overall was excellent.