D2 Anthony Huynh

My Life Changes

“He had me in an iron grip, my arm wrenched up behind my back.” He has a miserable life. Ludlow knew his parents would hurt him. “He (pa) forced opened my mouth and ran a balanced, foul tasting finger around my gums.” They took out Ludlow’s front teeth, gonna sell Ludlow’s front teeth for a living, and they all monstrously chuckled right in front of Ludlow’s face. They put him in the chair and ran off to do some other stuff. When Pa came over, Ludlow angrily kicked Pa directly to his stomach. He got out of the chair and quickly ran off.

He couldn’t figure out where to go, so he decided to hide under the bridge over River Foedus. “I would have died there if it had not been for ma and pa. They saved me, though it was not their intention, when they delivered me, their only son, into the hands of Barton Gumboot.” After all the fact that my parents would hurt me, he has a misfortune of being born in the city. He can feel the agony going right into him.

He decided to leave the city and start a new life with Joe. Joe is the person who is a “secret pawnbroker” where he swaps secret for money, so he can give the money to the villagers, who are in desperate need of it. Ludlow finds out that Joe is not really that bad as his parents. Ludlow is going to write the secrets in the black book where his secrets appear.

Joe is asking Ludlow some questions about him. He is helping Ludlow out and tells Ludlow his opinions to that situation. He helps Ludlow with his sentences and supports him by taking care of him. Joe as you can see is now trained to do everything. His life is starting to get better.

What the author can improve on is to try to remove “A Note from the Author” before the story starts because in the second paragraph, it talks about Ludlow’s mistakes and that can ruin the whole book showing that Ludlow couldn’t write a perfect memoir. “The fragments and extracts are reproduced here exactly as they were written. I corrected Ludlow’s spelling - it really was quite dreadful - but I did no more than that.” In the book, we can already tell if there is a sentence fragment or not. And “What matters is the story the document tell.” Can you add a bit more detail into it? I believe that the first part is not that necessary.

The story is telling us about beginning a new life. Out of the sentences in the story that I read, I can picture it in my mind of how Ludlow is feeling and how Ludlow is taking it step by step to start a new life as he is meeting new people at the village. There is new people talking to him showing how they react to other people. Anyways, they are very poor and powerless. I feel like a nine year old and up can read this book because after reading the first chapter, it encourages the children to keep reading to find out how his life changes and how other characters feel about their lives.

After Ludlow moved away from his parents, everything can be changed.

The Black Book of Secrets
by: F.E. Higgins
266 pp. Copyright 2007 $14.95 (United States), $18.50 (Canada)
(ages nine to twelve)