Book+Review

'The Freedom Writers Diary"


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Tolerance; a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry. The novel " The Freedom Writers Diary"by Erin Gruwell tells an inspiring story about how one ninth grade English teacher changed the lives of 150 under estimated students that would never succeed in life and turns them into the A and B students that people thought they would never be. In my opinion, the author did a great job in setting up the book.

A couple things the author did well while writing this book is how she got my attention just by reading the first diary. When reading books, I think that it is important to grab the reader’s attention in the beginning of the book so you have them hooked throughout the whole book and you don’t lose their interest before the book gets good. Another feature I enjoyed was how she used her student’s diaries to make the whole book. Every single diary entry was written by other high school students around my age. I thought it was interesting how they told their life stories from their point of view, instead of seeing all the gang violence and race issues on the news how I am used to seeing it, they were witnessing it in their own homes and neighborhoods. The worst feature in my opinion was how they didn’t address the names of the people who wrote the stories. They just addressed them as Diary 1, Diary 2, Diary 3, etc. I think the book would have had a lot more meaning if they mentioned names and expressed who the author of each story was. Another thing I liked about the book was how the students wrote diary entry’s explaining things that happened to them every day. The good and the bad, they wrote about it all. They also wrote about how they started as the kids that would never succeed in anything in life and how they became the top student in the school with the help of just one teacher. This was very inspiring to me and it made me realize that anything is possible if you set your mind to it. I would recommend this book to other people because it is very inspiring. And it gives good details. Every diary entry you read gave you a different picture in your head and I think that is what every book needs