The Return - Setting

The loneliness and emptiness in the beginning of the story create a feeling that the man is isolated. The setting around the man shows how he feels. Lonely. He comes back home after years and the first thing he sees is the river that is still the same and this is a symbol for him that the other things with his family and friends will be the same too.

Novel- reading journal

The book, the magician’s nephew, which I am reading at the moment, is about two little kids, a boy and a girl, that live near London.
Like all the kids, also these two like adventures and they find a secret corridor between two houses. At the end of this corridor, they find the boy's uncle’s secret study room, in that he is hiding in all day and nobody knows what he is doing in there. Opening the door, they find the boy’s uncle. He is forcing them to go in another world that he said he discovered. On that journey they find out that there is a world between a whole bunch of other worlds, which are hidden behind paddles. To get in these worlds they need two different colored rings.

As far as is read the story, it reminds me on my dreams that I always had when I was a child. I always wished that I could just disappear sometimes and go to another world, where everything is different, and discover it. Reading the book makes me feel like a child again. I really want to know what else is going to happen in the story. Whether they are discovering new worlds and how these are going to be like. Maybe some of the worlds are the same as the ones that I always imagined when I was younger.

In the story, I especially liked the part when the “middle world” was described. The author used a lot of metaphors and so I can imagine this place really good and reading it makes me feel like I an right there. It is such a quiet and peaceful place, where you feel relaxed and satisfied and nothing seems to be changing that.

“Touching bottom”

The story “Touching Bottom” by K.S. is about the fear of the unknown and the overcoming of it. In the story a woman is at the beach with her stepson and he wants to go deeper in the water. The woman that has a fear of unclear water since her childhood and is afraid, but she is finally doing it.
But then the situation gets out of control. They are in too deep water and they can’t get back to the beach. Now the woman has to decide whether she rescues herself or her stepson. She overcomes her fear and can rescue her stepson and herself.

The story is full of conflicts in every sort. It is a conflict between the woman and the water, when she tries to survive, a conflict between the woman and herself, when she fights against her own fear, another conflict between the woman and her dad, when he doesn’t come to her marriage, and also a conflict between the woman and herself again, when she has to decide whether she wants to rescue her stepsons life or her own life.

I think the water is a metaphor for her whole life, after that day she finally recognizes that her husband didn’t deserve her and that she had to care more about her life and things that are happening in it.
She isn’t afraid anymore of the ocean, but she has respect.

I know the fear to swim without knowing what is on the ground. Once, when I was younger, a friend told me a story about a part of a train that is in the ground of a lake, that we used to swim in. From that day on I always had a bad feeling when I was swimming in the middle of a lake. I always had the bad feeling that something could be sticking out and o could hurt myself swimming right in the middle, and having no way to get back to the shore. Because if that I can feel how the woman in the story feels about the ocean.
She is afraid because she has no idea if she will survive or not.