What I'm Reading
        I am currently reading If I Stay by Gayle Forman. It is about a girl named Mia, who is a cellist in a family full of rock and roll. She is very good at what she does, but she has always felt like an outcast in her own family. When they all pile in the car to go out shopping on a snow day, the unexpected happens. Mia and her family are in an accident. And a bad one at that. Her parents die on impact and within minutes, Mia and her brother, Teddy, are being shipped away to the nearest hospital. Mia is unconscious, but somehow she can see and hear everything going on around her. She is like a ghost, she can walk around the hospital and see her loved ones, but she can't make any noises and she doesn't have any superpowers either.
        Currently in the book, the doctors wouldn't let Adam, Mia's boyfriend, and Kim, (Mia's best friend)inside to see Mia, making Adam and Kim want to get in to see her even more. They create this crazy plan to distract the nurses for just long enough for them to slip in and see Mia. Unfortunately, the head nurse comes in right before they can see her. The head nurse calls for security and the two of them are escorted away. When they come out of the elevator, there is another nurse waiting outside. She threatens to tell the boss that they are taking two people trying to see a girlfriend in critical condition to security. That makes the security guards let them go without much argument. Mia's ghost then realizes that this is Teddy's nurse. Was Teddy's nurse. Just by the look of her, disheveled hair and bags under her eyes, Mia knows. She's alone. Mom and Dad are gone. And now so is Teddy. She begins to wonder if it would be better if she just went as well.

PROMPT B:
Complex characters are made gradually throughout a book by the author subtly dropping hints every now and then. If an author thoroughly described every new character, the story would feel very forced and unnatural. Just like in real life, you need to discover something about a person periodically, just like you wouldn't meet someone new and somehow know everything about them. For example, in Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight, there were two different points of view, one for Amelia, and another one for Kate, Amelia's mother. Since there were two points of view, we could discover more things about the characters faster than with only one point of view. Kimberly McCreight does an excellent job of characterizing Amelia. She characterizes her as a girl who cares about academics and does a great job in them. In the first few pages of the book, it starts off in Kate's point of view, when she gets a call saying that Amelia has gotten into trouble and Kate needs to pick her up as soon as possible. This immediately makes you wonder what Amelia has done because she is a very well behaved student, causing the reader to read on. An example from the text to support this is on page 9 in Reconstructing Amelia,

“‘Apparently Amelia has gotten into some kind of trouble, which doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t get into trouble.’

‘Amelia? I’m fresh off singing her praises in that recommendation for the summer reading program at Princeton, so I may be biased, but I certainly don’t buy it.’ Jeremy put a sympathetic hand momentarily on Kate’s shoulder and smiled again (McCreight 9).”
Overall, authors develop characters slowly throughout the book to make you want to read on and in Kimberly McCreight did an excellent job of that in Reconstructing Amelia.

Reconstructing Amelia Article

My article is about how Kimberly McCreight came up with the idea to make Reconstructing Amelia and it tells us about her life. It turns out, this was her fourth book she's written, but she hasn't published any of the other ones just yet. She has had a bit of a struggle writing these books, she was told by her agent that her second book was so bad it was "unsalable"! All in all, Kimberly McCreight delivered a fantastic read for young girls.