Maps to Anywhere Review

How To Draw

Pg. 31-34

I read and decided to review How to draw because of the title. It concerned me because I am an Art minor and can draw myself. When I seen the title I immediately thought that it would connect with me. When I began to read the story I shortly realized that it was not about teaching people how to draw but about the whole concept of art itself. He starts out talking about how a regular person's little amateur art was better than a professional art piece. He then elaborate on that idea. He begins to tell the audience that art is a piece of work created to reflect someone's emotions and feelings. Which then backs his idea up that amateur art is better than professional art. It now makes since. A picture a child draw for his parents is more emotional than a professional art piece where there is no emotion.
He then talks about how he was interested in art and when he first began to be. He talked about his little brother being into art and came down with a terminal illness. He talks about how him and his mother coped with the situation. When his mother took interest in Toulouse-Lautrec art, he was actually researching different artworks. His favorite was minimal art as simple as it was. He pursued what his little brother loved and learned about what his little brother loves and why. After his brother died he kept researching art. He even says that he went to school for art and took every class for it. Now he go around collecting valuable artistic sculptures and drawings. He does not buy professional pieces though, he like to collect doodles from bored students, folded paper and other artwork of that kind. He believe that they are more valuable than professionals. Once I got to the end I realized that he actually was teaching people how to draw in a way. He was encouraging people that whatever artwork that they make rather time consuming and complicated with full effort to simple drawings on the side of your paper, was a great artistic piece of work and better than the professionals' work.

Fiction Packet 3 Review

When I read fiction packet 3 I decided to review "When It Rains It Rains A River." This story talked about two brothers who loved the rain. When it rained usual children go in the house but they go outside to play. They play in mud and love when it rains. Most of the short story was metaphorical and I even got the feel that I was reading a poem at times. For example when the author says "When the rain stops drumming down, us brothers, we drop down, onto our hands and knees, down in mud, and we begin to eat. We eat until our bellies are big with mud." I believe that they were not actually not eating mud but metaphorically speaking. Mud is the building block of life so it means that they are eating plants. Also "We look up into girl's eyes to see that each moon, it is a mirror." I believe that it was referring to being in a relationship. "When we dive inside each of these moons, each moon shatters into a billion pieces. Each broken chunk becomes a star... The stars are burning fish." It reminds me of a heart break. And finally "Watch us brothers reach out to these burning fish fires with our hands mittened with mud. We stick our hands, unfisted, into this fire." This symbolize the boys reaching out for help or forgiveness from the girls. This story is filled with metaphors and pretty much talks about the boys relationship troubles.

Juice Response (Rant)

Well for this book I am probably going to keep this review short because I don't want to rant for a long time. For this book I couldn't grasp the concept of the story. Not just for one story but for all of the stories that compiled the book. The one story in which infuriated me was the first. To start off I couldn't understand the main character. Beginning with the fact that it was impossible for me to find it's damn gender. If you as a reader cannot connect with the main character of the story, you will not be able care for the story. Also as a character of a story there has to be some type of development for that character. When the story begins you should be able to see your character's goal, personality and their resolve. As the story progresses you should be able to see every character change, especially the main character. The thing that I hate the most about this story and all the others also is that the characters are so damn blank and unable to connect with, which makes it a boring story. As with the other stories, the characters were distant (if they were actually different or not) which made the stories not able to be enjoy. The stories had nothing attractive towards them in which I no idea what the plots were about. Well that's pretty much all I have for this review