Analyze how dialogue or specific incidents reveal information about characters**
Pages read: 0-70
The Rules of Survival tells the story of Matthew, a thirteen year old boy. He lives with his eleven year old sister, his five year old sister, and his abusive mother. The story is told in Mathew's POV as he writes the abusive events in the form of a letter to his youngest sister. He wants to write her this letter so that she can truly understand what she went through as a child and so she can know the rules of survival (hence the title).
With the book's topic being domestic abuse, a lot of the word choice has been negative. One of the first examples of this is, "I wonder if you really need to know exactly what happened to us -- me, you, Callie -- at the hands of our mother." Most of the negativity in this sentence comes from him just saying "at the hands of our mother." When people use that phrase (at the hands of whatever), they usually mean that something bad has happened and this person has caused it or been the one to inflict it. So from that, even if you didn't know what the book was about, you could come to the conclusion that he's going to tell the story of bad things that happened to him and his siblings because of his mother.The topic of the book not only allows for negative events, but it allows for positive events as well. These events, both good and bad, help give us an understanding of which characters should be labeled under good or bad. One example of this is when Matthew directs to his youngest sister: "I don't want to hear any details about what happened when our mother kidnapped you -- so long as you've forgotten it, anyway. So long as you're not having screaming nightmares or something." We can learn quite a bit about a few characters just from this one quote. We learn that Matthew is bothered by the things his mother does. We can see that he hates them and does not want to hear about them. But, we also learn that he cares about his sister very much. We know that he hates hearing about the terrible things his mother does. Even so, he'd be willing to listen to his sister talk about them if the events have frightened her and talking to him would help. We can also see he cares because if she doesn't even remember it, he isn't going to interrogate her on the kidnapping and risk her remembering even the smallest detail of what she went through.
There is a character is this book named Murdoch. So far, he's the only character that has stood up for Matthew and his siblings against their mother. When we're first introduced to Murdoch, we can already get a bit of information about his character. "The father's eyes bulged. His fists were clenched. He drew one arm back. But Murdoch was still looking straight at him, and I knew--you could feel it vibrating in the air--that even though Murdoch had said he wouldn't hit him, he wanted to. He wanted to hurt him. 'Hit me,' Murdoch said. 'Come on. Better me than the kid.' " In this scene, Murdoch was standing up for a child that was being abused by his father publicly in a store. We can see that Murdoch has a strong sense of justice. Instead of ignoring the events like many of the other shoppers, he confronted the father to help the child. Along with that, we can also see that he knows what's OK to do and what's not OK to do. It was OK to stand up to the father. It was OK to tell the father to hit him rather than his child (it was brave, too). However, he knew that it would not have been OK to hit the father, even if he wanted to; even if he felt the father deserved it. We can see he knows where to draw the line.
I don't know how I feel about this book...Right now, 5/10. Not bad, but not very good either. I'm not very far into it so it's hard to say. There's just something about it that bothers me a bit. I might even go as far as to say it's ever so slightly boring. Maybe, it's a good idea for a book but it's just been executed a bit poorly? Right now, I just wouldn't recommend this book. It's very so-so.
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