Prompt 2: Vocab

"A meth addict on a binge is chaos walking and talking. In the first day or two, his emotion swings. Gregarious at one moment. Paranoid in the next. Euphoric, and then drowning in the depths of depression" (Patterson, 46). There are two words in this quote that I am not familiar with, "binge" and "Gregarious". Using context clues, I can infer that "binge" means a streak of, or time period of which someone is doing something. I looked up the term on dictionary.com, and I found "a period or bout, usually brief, of excessive indulgence, as in eating, drinking alcoholic beverages, etc.; spree." I was somewhat accurate. The other word that I didn't know was "Gregarious". using context clues, I can infer that it means the opposite of paranoid. Paranoid means to be worried or frightened, so I can infer that Gregarious means, relaxed, laid-back, or worry free. When searching the word on dictionary.com, I found "fond of the company of others; sociable.". Although I was not exactly correct, I was on the right track. Another hard word is "Euphoric", but from prior knowledge, I know that it means to be in a very happy state.

"Merry Christmas, Alex Cross" is really exciting. I started off very confused but I got it after awhile and it is really interesting me. It takes place on Christmas Eve, late at night, and a man is holding his family hostage inside his home. He is a psychopath, and detective Alex Cross is trying to get him to stop.

Summer Reading Post

The theme of my book, "The Final Four", is that is you work hard enough and never give up, you can accomplish anything. You should never back down and never give in.

“Play-By-Play Man: Both teams seemed exhausted at the end of forty minutes of regulation time. But now this game is more than three hours old. They've played just eleven seconds shy of four additional five-minute overtimes. That’s nearly sixty minutes of game clock, not to mention the emotional exhaustion as well.

Color Commentator: At this point there’s no such thing as exhaustion for these players. There’s just the will to win. One team is going on to the National Championship Game in forty-eight hours; the other team is going home. That’s enough to carry them forward” (Volponi, 238) This quote from my book shows that if enough determination, you can accomplish anything. The players in that game never gave up and never stopped giving it their all, and in the end Michigan State came out victorious.

My book is about two college basketball teams, Michigan State and Troy, who have made it to the final four of the NCAA College Basketball tournament. About half of each chapter takes place in the actual game, which leads up to a shocking ending at the end of the book, and the other half's of the chapters are flashbacks to times in the players lives before the big game, which add lots of depth to all of the characters. It shows how hard all of the players have worked to make it there, and all of the struggles they have been through.

The Final Four Article

This article was written by the author Paul Volponi himself, describing the characters of the book. I think he does a good job of accurately summarizing the characters and it is interesting to hear how he got the ideas for using them.