Post #9: Book 4 Listicle

5 Reasons Why Alex is the Perfect Guy for Katie,  Erin

            Choosing Safe Haven I had to go into the book with an open mind and not know what kind of details would be thrown at me. I had seen the movie and wanted to read the book. After reading the entire book, I look back and see how perfect Alex is for Katie. He fights for her to notice him and when he finally gets her attention he loves her for everything that she has been through. He wasn’t letting Katie’s past scare him away. That to me is amazing.

1.      Alex owns a store in Southport, North Carolina and there is where he first notices Katie. “Another woman interested him, though he knew almost nothing about her, aside from the fact that she was singe. She’d been coming to the store once or twice a week since early March” (19). There was something in Katie that drew him to her. Alex knew nothing about Katie and he was determined to find out the real her.

2.      As the summer progressed Alex was noticing some changes in Katie. “She’d changed in recent weeks. She had the beginnings of a summer tan and her skin had a glowing freshness to it. She was also growing less skittish around him, today being a prime example. No, they hadn’t set the world on fire with their scintillating conversation, but it was a start, right?” (47). In this example Alex and Katie are starting to build a friendship kind of. Katie was also beginning to relax around Alex, which is a good sign. Alex use to be a detective and could notice some deeper things in Katie. “From the very beginning, he’d sensed she was in trouble, and his instinctive response had been to want to help. And of course she was pretty, despite the bad haircut and plain-Jane attire. But it was seeing the way Katie had comforted Kristen after Josh had fallen in the water that had really moved him. Even more affecting had been Kristen’s response to Katie. She had reached for Katie like a child reaching for her mother” (47). Alex was starting to have feelings for Katie because of the way she reacted to his children, Josh and Kristen. Alex could tell something was off that she was hiding but he doesn’t care about her past.

3.      Katie didn’t know how to drive and couldn’t afford a car even if she did have her license. She would walk everywhere she went, to work or the store. One day it was raining pretty hard, so Alex gave her a ride from the store. The storm was really bad and it wasn’t going to be letting up anytime soon. Later that even Katie and her friend Jo were talking and Jo goes to leave and that’s when they found a present that was left for Katie. “A woman’s bike, it had wire baskets on each side of the rear wheel, as well as another wire basket on the front. A chain was wrapped loosely around the seat, with the key still in the lock. ‘Who would bring me a bicycle?’” (67-68). Alex and his kids fixed up an old bike they had laying around and gave it to Katie because she needed easier transportation. On Katie’s side she didn’t want to keep the bike. But once she listened to Alex’s side, she knew she had to keep it.

4.      Alex asked Katie on a date and she offered to make dinner for the two of them at her house. Katie had finally accepted that Alex made her feel safe and it was time for her to open up to him. So he knew the entire story of Katie, or should I say Erin. “This what it feels like to really love someone, she thought, and to be loved in return, and she could feel the tears beginning to form. She blinked, trying to will them back, but all at once, they were impossible to stop. She loved him and wanted him, but more than that, she wanted him to love the real her, with all her flaws and secrets. She wanted him to know the whole truth” (129).  

5.      The ending of Safe Haven is when the hero of Alex comes out. Katie was babysitting Josh and Kristen while Alex went and picked a friends daughter up at the airport. Katie had put the kids in bed and she fell asleep watching TV. “Smoke meant fire, and now she could see the flames outside the window, dancing and twisting orange. The door was on fire, smoke billowing from the kitchen in thick clouds. She heard roaring, a sound like a train, heard cracks and pops and splintering, her mind taking it in at once. ‘Oh, my God. The kids.’” (305). She proceeded to the children and got them out of the house. Then when they got out she saw, Kevin, her husband she left for a fresh start. Kevin had set the house on fire wanting to kill them all. Kevin was very drunk and was beating Katie as soon as he saw them. Katie got the kids to run for safety. Alex soon showed up and got her away from Kevin and they soon went to her house because that’s where the kids were. Kevin had left before them and he was waiting for them. Kevin ended up hitting Alex in the head with a crowbar, but then Kevin died. Alex was in the hospital with some head injuries. Katie was sure that he wouldn’t ever want to see her, but she was wrong. “’Because it’s true. We survived and that’s all that matters.’ He reached for her hand and she felt his fingers intertwine with hers” (327). At that moment she knew Alex wasn’t going anywhere for a very long time.

    

Post #8: Book Talk Presentation

Post #7: Book 2 Trailer

Post #6 Book 3 Listicle

Five Reasons Why Susannah is a Very Strong Woman

When you pick up Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan, you have no idea what you are about to dive into. It starts off with “Maybe it all began with a bug bite, from a bedbug that didn’t exist” (3). At this point I was thinking what that what am I about to spend my time reading? That is until we really got to meet Susannah. By the end of the book you see how strong of a woman Susannah Cahalan is.

1.     Susannah had this amazing job at The Post Newspaper and she was doing pretty well. Then one day she had a meeting that she was completely unprepared for, so she was just going to wing it. “’That’s really just not good enough,’ Steve interrupted. ‘You need to be bringing in better stuff than this. Okay? Please don’t come in with nothing again.’ Paul nodded, his face blazing red. For the first time since I’d started working on my high school newspaper, journalism disagreed with me. I left the meeting furious at myself and bewildered by my own ineptitude” (6). After this meeting she was going to never walk into a meeting unprepared again, but that didn’t happen. There was something going on inside, medically maybe even emotionally? Who knows?  

2.     Susannah was going through something and wouldn’t tell anyone. “Moments later, the migraine returned, as did the nausea. It was then that I first noticed my left hand felt funny, like an extreme case of pins and needles” (12). That was the first sign of something not right inside. That event was just foreshadowing when Susannah would have a seizure in front of her boyfriend. “I was gasping for air. My body continued to stiffen as I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth. Terrified, Stephen stifled a panicked cry and for a second he stared, frozen, at my shaking body” (40). This was the start of a very long month of being in the hospital and having tests done to find out what was wrong inside.

3.     Being in the hospital for Susannah was very rough. “Two escape attempts earned me a one-to-one guard; now, after the third attempt in as many days, one nurse casually suggested to my father that if I kept dislocating the wires and trying to escape, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay” (91). Susannah worked hard and tried to the best of her ability not to rebel. And she got moved to another floor and got into a “normal” routine. “By now, my family had developed a routine. Now that I was again comfortable in his presence, my father would arrive in the morning, feed me a breakfast yogurt and cappuccino, and play a few games of cards that I was often too disoriented to follow” (100). 

4.     It then came time for Susannah to meet another doctor, Dr. Najjar, he had a really good reputation so they had high intentions of figuring out what was wrong. Dr. Najjar came into the room and did series of little “field” tests, then he thought clock test. And at the end Najjar and the family finally got some results. “Dr. Najjar, beaming, grabbed the paper, showed it to my parents, and explained what this meant. They gasped with a combination of terror and hope. This was finally the clue that everyone was searching for. It didn’t involve machinery or invasive tests; it required only paper and pen. It had given Dr. Najjar concrete evidence that the right hemisphere of my brain was inflamed” (131).

5.     Once everything was figured out, Susannah was able to go home and receive treatment from her house. Susannah considered this part her partial return. “A nurse would arrive midmornings to hook up my IV to the bags of immunoglobulin over three to four hours. Between July and December, I had twelve infusions” (210). Now after her partial return she is going to work and having a social life again. “I recall agreeing obediently as Human Resources suggested that they would start me off slowly at first, part time for only a few days a week. Instead I jumped right back in as if I had never been gone” (214).

In conclusion, after Susannah had a very rough month, she wasn’t going to give up on getting answers. She needed to know what was wrong, so she could get back to her normal lifestyle. Then once she got an answer she jumped back into her job with both feet and she also continued her relationships she had, had before being sick.