A Long Walk to Water: A look at Salva

So in A Long Walk to Water there are two main characters, boy and a girl.  Just to recap from my last post, the boy's (Salva) story takes place from 1985 to 2009 and the girl's (Nya) story takes place from 2008 to 2009.  The narrator switches off between telling the two stories.

While I was reading the book I noticed that the author, Linda Sue Park, describes how Salva leads a group in almost the exact same way twice, once in 1991-1992 during the telling of Salva's story, and once in 2009 during the telling of Nya's story.

*Slight Spoiler Alert*

Here is the quote from Salva's story. On page 81 it says "Salva would talk to them [the boys he was directing], encourage them, coax and persuade them.  Once in a while he a to speak sternly, or even shout. But he tried not to do this so often." Then on pages 76-76 from Nya' s story it says "The boss would encourage the workers and laugh and joke with them.  If that didn't work, he would talk to them earnestly and try to persuade them.  And if that didn't work, he would get angry. He didn't get angry very often." We later learn that the boss is Salva.

Okay, so my question was there any point in the fact that there are many similarities in the way the author describes Salva.  I think that there is a point. I think that it shows how mature Salva's experiences have made him, and how mature he already was in the first case.  In the first case he has been without his family or anyone to help him for six years. That is a very long time to be away from your family, especially if you don't know if you will ever see them again. I don't think it is ever something someone would want.

Don't Judge a Book By It's Cover (or not)

So a long, long, long, time ago I started reading this book called a A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park.  About a month ago I finished it. So I meant to post something on it a long time ago but... well whatever. Okay, so before I read the book I wrote down some things about what I thought the book was going to be about thinking that it might make a good post to compare what I thought it was going to be like and what it actually was like.  I basically judged the book by its cover, and inside cover :). So here we are.

So on the inside cover it said that the book was about two children growing up in the war torn country of Sudan. I thought that the book would be told as one story even though it was about two different children. I thought it would be a story about survival and perseverance.

As it turned out the two stories took place at completely different times, one in 1985-2009 and one from 2008-2009.  The stories were told by a narrator (not someone in the story) and they switched off telling one person's story and then another.  It was about perseverance but, the two characters persevered in different ways.  I found this really interesting.

Normally when a book just randomly switches off between two stories or perspectives it annoys me and makes it hard to follow the story.  But in this case it actually made the book really enjoyable to read.  It added a little suspense which, even though I don't normally like suspense, helped the book stay interesting.