All the Lovely Bad Ones

Reader’s Journal #16

Dear Mrs. Zrihen,                           12/13/11

      I just finished reading the book All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn.  I just realized this book was about more than one ghost.  Two strategies I used before reading the book were skim and scanning for text features and predicted that the book would be about a ghost because I saw a ghost on the front cover.  Two strategies I used were visualized Corey being a ghost and I skipped a few pages.  Two strategies I used after reading were figure out if my prediction was right, it was, and I wrote a reader’s journal to show you that I understand.

      The quote I picked was “you woke Miss Ada up and she woke us up.  Now you have to put us back to sleep.”  The reason I picked this quote is because it gave me a lot of information.  The significance of this quote is it explains why there were shadows, things pintching people, everything flying in the air and more (because there were ghost that Corey and Travis woke up).

      The characters in the book are Travis, Corey, grandma, mom, Calebs, Mrs. Perkins, Miss Ada, Mrs. Kowalski, Mrs. Brewster, Henry, Seth, Ira, Mrs. Donovan, Tracy, Chester, Mrs. Duval, Mr. Nelson, Tim, Robert, the Jenningses, and Mr. Brewster.  Travis and Corey are antagonist because they caused the ghosts to wake up.  The protagonist is Mrs. Brewster because she caused the ghost to stop doing things they were doing and talk to Corey and Travis.  And the rest of the characters I listed were foils. 

      The genre of this book is Fantasy, Fiction because it has ghosts in it and it’s a ghost story.  The tone of this book is funny and the mood is scary.  What made the book scary was how the ghost were just doing scary things like turning off the light or throwing pebbles at Corey and Travis and then laughing.  I thought this was scary because I pretended I was in Corey’s shoes.  What I learned was to not play tricks on other people.  The message of this book is to not believe everything someone says.  The author’s point of view is first person because the author says I, me, my, etc.  The author’s purpose is to entertain the reader with a ghost story.     The pattern of organization was cause and effect because everything happened because of something.  For example, Corey and Travis went to their grandma’s inn because they weren’t able to go to camp because they wouldn’t accept them.  They acted like ghost because in a book it said people moved away from the inn because there were ghosts and people that go to the inn want to see a ghost. 

       The plot structure is Travis and Corey go to their grandma’s for the summer and they really want to do a trick.  They pretend to be ghosts and wake up the real ghost.  Then the ghost start to do these things like mess up their room, throw pebbles at them and turn on all the radios as high as possible.  Their grandma blames them for everything.  Then Corey and Travis meet the ghosts (Seth, Ira, and Calebs).  Then they become friends and the ghost stay in the inn.

       I would rate this book a ten out of ten because I barely put the book down when I started reading it.

Sincerely,

Erika Alban