For Hole in My Life I took a lot of notes. If I noticed any “sign posts”, I wrote it down on a Google doc to keep my thinking in one place. But in this book, I noticed a lot of foreshadowing. When I saw foreshadowing, I wrote it down and explained why I felt this was going to happen. I then revisited my theory the next time and I also wrote annotations. One example of this is when the main character was on the boat smuggling drugs on page 100. I knew he was going to get caught because he kept talking about how scared he was of getting punished. He also mentioned how little experience he had in sailing. To me, that seemed like a combination that was going to land him in jail.
Also, when we had a group discussion I wrote down any notes or thoughts the discussion made me think of. I feel like this was a great way to do my annotations, but I still liked writing in the book. I read the book twice, once just to read it and another to read it very carefully and write notes. When I saw a pattern, I would look back and see where I could see that pattern in other parts of the book. If it seemed like a noteworthy pattern, I wrote it down on the Google doc.
Throughout the book I had several theories, one of which was that he was going to go to jail because of the amount of drugs he has been taking. Going to jail was going to straighten out his life. On page 57, he mentioned how he became part of the drug culture. This showed that there was a good chance that he would eventually be caught and then he was going to be in jail. Once you get addicted to drugs, it is really hard to stop. Pretty soon, a user might start dealing drugs. They just cannot escape the drugs no matter how hard they try. In fact, on this page he expressed how he could not get away from drugs. This made me think that if he never quit, he would probably end up in jail. Also, on page nine we can see that he is sent away for high school. Even though this was his choice, I felt like he needed more support at this young age. Because of this he had a rough start to his life, which eventually connected him to drugs. But, the one place in the world with the most amount of restrictions and support is jail. It seemed logical that because he did not have a good amount of support in his life he would make a big mistake. I thought that because of this mistake a court would recognize that he needs extra support. So, they would send him to jail until he straightened up and maybe he would then get a proper education and become a writer. Next, on page 23, we can see that his high school was a former prison. This is major foreshadowing. If his high school is a former prison, the author is practically screaming that he will go to jail. He often laughed this point off but this shows he did not think he could end up in jail. This point is supported on page 28. On this page we can see that former inmates visit his school to give a speech about how not to end up in jail. He laughs this off also. He treats jail like a joke until later when he is about to go to jail. Jail becomes way too real. He gets scared and what he did not think about before comes back to bite him. All of these lead me to the logical conclusion that he would go to jail.
This theory really relates to human nature. When the author is writing this he has already done all these things. He is human, he cannot just block out all of these experiences like some sort of robot. He is probably upset he had to go to jail. When he was writing about his school being a former prison or having former inmates visit his school and how he laughed it off like some sort of joke,. emotions had to come to the surface. That is only human nature. When people are sad, they put emphasis on what lead them to their mistakes. The author did this in his book. When he was discussing the parts of the events that lead up to going to jail, you could tell he spent more time on them. It is human nature to spend more time on that part if you are sad about it. I know this about my writing., If I have a strong emotion about a story I am writing, I spend more time on it and the writing style is a bit different. The same is true for this book.
This is a really good book. I would rate it an eight out of ten. This is because I really like the writing style and the way he portrayed himself. I also like how he hinted at what was going to happen to him. His writing style seems very observant and careful. I can really tell the author put a lot of thought into writing this book. I really enjoyed it and found it entertaining. I would recommend this book to everyone. The reason I am giving it an eight is because I thought in the beginning it was a bit slow and then later in the story it moved too fast. Since this story was about his mistakes and learning from them in jail, I thought he should have spent a bit less time on the beginning when he was not in jail and more time on what he did after jail. Other than that I really liked this book.