Boyne, Haddon, Whyman

Here's the latest in the series of impressive Transition Year Extended Essays we've been posting over recent weeks. Robbie Hollis wrote about the theme of Troubled Childhoods in three novels - John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and Mark Whyman's Boy Kills Man.

In his conclusion Robbie reflects on the experience of writing this long essay:-

In the introduction I outlined the basic plots of the books, and introduced the characters and people in the books. I found that this was easy, as there was a lot to write about, and I felt I had to hold myself back, because it is very easy to write pages on the plot of a book, basically retelling it, but very hard to write about the actual people, places and story, without just saying line after line about what happens in the book itself.

When going through the relationships I decided to stick to the main character in each of the books. Otherwise I could have rambled on forever about every little character in each book, and thought this would be rather boring. I learnt that when I read a book I don’t really think in a lot of detail about the relationships characters have with each other, until I have to write about it, then I thought about it in a lot more detail, and for future reference I think I will stop and maybe think just what each relationship means to each person, and how the plot and story are affected by each and every relationship, whether it is in a small way, or a big way.

Whilst I was on character changes, I also found a great depth of things to write about in the subject. I discovered that in every book, almost all of the characters change in some way, and this is the core focus of the book, although I didn’t realise before that all books tell of great adventure, or saddening loss, or violent crime, but if I look closely I will see that the author is writing it around the character, and not the plot, and that this is the way to write and focus on a book, do not think about the action or adventure, or excessive violence, think of the character and how he or she changes through out the course of the book. I believe from now on I will look at books in a very different, more personal way, and I think that everybody should discover what I have, and be able to read a book in that way.

Read Robbie's full essay here.

Magorian, Boyne, Rosoff

Kate Boyd Crotty of Transition Year was awarded a Commendation for her Extended Essay on Childhood in three novels - John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Michelle Magorian's Goodnight Mr Tom and How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff.

Kate writes :-

For my extended essay, I chose the theme of Childhood. I chose this topic because I was very interested in it and I had recently read many novels that I thought would be good to compare. I didn’t want to choose a subject that I would get bored of easily or one that I would end up hating when I was working on it. Each has a similar background of war and the changes that come with it but they all have their own unique inner-stories as well. The main character of each book is a child or young person, in one a teenage girl and two 9-year old boys in the others.

Read her full essay here.

Rosoff, Swindells, Downham

In her Transition Year Extended Essay, Olivia Plunket wrote about the theme of childhood in three novels - Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, Robert Swindells's Abomination, and Jenny Downham's Before I Die. Olivia writes:-

When we think of children, the first thing that comes to our minds is innocence and naivety. A child is the purest form of life on this planet, its faultless heart isn’t poisoned by the cruel realities of life, and it is always true to itself and isn’t bothered by what people think of it. A child can bring so much happiness into someone’s life. Parents can return to their childhood as they watch their own child grow and strengthen before their very eyes.

I chose the theme childhood because after reading How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, I gained a completely different perspective on my own life as well as the lives of those around me. I know that my three I have chosen are fictional, but I also know that some of the things the children in these book have to go through, happen in real life. To me no childhood is perfect. No child is the same, each one is unique, they all see the world differently. This is ironic because children of a certain age all try to be the same, look the same, act the same, but as they grow up they’ll realise that no clothes, or attitude can change who you are. When we grow old and weary, we will all look back at our childhoods, and we will see no faults or flaws, we will see the ecstasy and bliss we got out of it, and we’ll wonder why we wasted it wanting to grow up. Childhood can be torn apart by love or war, it can also be uplifted to the heavens, but it will never be appreciated in its time because when you are a child you won’t appreciate the freedom of it, because you will never have it taken away from you.

I chose these books because I believe that they all explore the depths of

childhood in very different ways. This is what I believe to be the most important thing and what will allow me to take you into these books on the journeys which are so irreplaceable and show you how much they really mean to those who experience them.

Read Olivia's full impressive comparative essay here.

(we're now on a weekend Exodus, returning on Tuesday morning).

Levi, Opdyke, Boyne

Continuing our series of fine Transition Year Extended Essays, which were completed at the end of last term, here is Sophie Millar's essay on three books which deal with the Jewish Holocaust in the Second World War. She writes :-

I have chosen the theme of survival and the Holocaust. The three books I’ve chosen to study are The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (John Boyne), In my Hands (Irene Gut Opdyke), and If This Is A Man (Primo Levi). They are linked together by World War Two but connected most strongly by the subject of the Holocaust. Through reading each book they inevitable provoke questions about the “Jewish Solution”, and you find yourself wanting and needing an answer. These events are historical, in the past, and I am glad for that. However, it is said that we should try to understand our past. I want, if possible, to discover some morality, some understanding of the Holocaust, and through these books try to find, and explain, an answer.

'Holocaust' comes from the Greek, meaning ‘completely burnt’ and is in general the term used for the mass planned extermination of about six million Jews during the Second World War by the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler. Am I supposed to understand and make sense of this? I don’t know, but that’s why I titled this project ‘To Decipher’, meaning to try and make sense of the senseless.

In each book there are survivors, and those that don’t survive, or in other words Sommersi ei Salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, another book by Levi). I want to focus and see what allowed the survivors to be saved, and the drowned to drown. What were the environments, so to speak. For this I will look at innocence and childhood, loneliness and other aspects of what made the books contain their stories. I want to examine also the guilt and the path to acceptance, if present, and their overcoming and returning to life after the War ends.

Read Sophie's full essay here.

Austen, du Maurier, Rowling

Last term Transition Year pupil Sope Anthony-Ojolola received a Distinction for her Extended Essay. She writes:-

Love is the main topic for all three of the books I have chosen for this essay, and many different types are portrayed in many different ways. The books I have chosen are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I think that these books really taught me a lot about just how much of an impact love has made on life in general and they were all brilliant and gripping in completely different ways. The three authors all had completely different styles of writing, but they each made them work in their own specific way.

Relationships, bonds, love, and most importantly, trust, all intertwine in all three of these books in such amazing and clever ways. All these heroes and heroines show us that the world is all based around love and that even though at some point we all wish that it was a much better place, it could also be much worse.

All these different relationships have made me think about how complicated relationships between people can actually be, but they all seem to be worth it at the end of the books. I hope I’ll be able to explain to you today what all these books have shown me about life and, of course, about love.

Read Sope's full essay here.

Forster, Hosseini, Shaffer

At the end of last term, Miriam Poulton was awarded a Commendation for her fine Extended Essay on the theme of location/setting in three different novels - A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows.

Miriam writes : -

One of the things all novels have in common is that they all have a setting, they all take place somewhere and sometime. In some books the setting is rich in detail and beautiful, in others it is simply the backdrop for the story. However, it is not the setting that I plan on looking at. Instead, I want to investigate something that can affect real life as well as that of characters in novels. Location can affect people’s moods and actions often to a very great extent and I thought it would be interesting to see how this happens in novels as well.

I have studied the theme of location in three very different novels. One takes place for the first half around the Italian city of Florence and for the second part a sleepy English village. My next book takes place just after the Second World War, in a London that is slowly rebuilding itself and a Guernsey that is recovering from occupation by the Germans. My third book takes place in war-torn Kabul, a city in Afghanistan. In each of these, the setting plays a large part in the story, it is affected by events and has an impact on characters. Often, a character’s home has the most profound effect on them, whether their home is where they have lived their whole life or a place they are only just discovering.

Read Miriam's full essay on these three novels here.

TY Extended Essay: Shan, King, Baker.

The latest TY Extended Essay we're posting is by Thomas Emmet, and examines violence in three works of fiction: Bec by Darren Shan, The Shining by Stephen King (famously made into a film starring Jack Nicholson), and a radio play, The Shepherd by Garrett Baker, which last week won the 'Drama of the Year' for RTE Radio 1 at the PPI Radio Awards.

Thomas writes, about the central figures of the latter two books:-

These two violent characters are incredibly well written. Both Garret Baker and Stephen King write them as very complex characters but in completely different ways. Anyone who has read a Stephen King novel knows that no character he writes is without a tragic backstory or some kind of mental disorder. This is not a bad thing. Fragmented characters are far more interesting then the one dimensional heroes that many pulp writers create. Jack Torrance is no different. He is one of the best-written Stephen King characters as we see his journey from father with a second chance to raving lunatic, and still have sympathy for him. Stephen King says in his introduction "a man who tries to kill his family partly because of his father’s influence over him... now that's scary”, which is a perfect description of what he creates. This is a very real monster, a creation of what we all have the potential to do.

Read the full Extended Essay here.

TY Extended Essay: Alexander, Ibbotson, Lingard

The second Transition Year Extended Essay we're posting is by Susannah Cooke, who chose three novels with historical backgrounds, and writes:

"The sub-theme that I have chosen for my extended essay is relationships in times of conflict, though I have chosen Relationships as the overall theme. The books that I have chosen to study are The Kitchen Boy- A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander, The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson and The 12th Day of July by Joan Lingard.

When I chose these books I didn’t realise that they had so much in common. Every time I find something new about one book, I notice that there is a connection in one or both of the other books. I chose these books as they all have some sort of relevance to me. Each one is set in a period in history, and as history is one of my favourite subjects I enjoy reading about it. The Kitchen Boy is set during the Russian Revolution, The Morning Gift in during World War II and The 12th Day of July is about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the conflict between Protestants and Catholics.

Reading these books wasn’t just a matter of pick them up, read them, and then never really think about them again. I had to analyse them, and this was probably the hardest part. Having never taken so much about a book into account, it was interesting seeing what I could discover when looking a bit deeper. With each book, I related to them differently, and had some own personal experiences and feelings that were similar in them. When reading a book, and I have nothing in common with it, it is much harder to read and focus on.

With each book set in a time of conflict, it made it easier to observe the differences and the similarities. My favourite book at the beginning of this essay was The Kitchen Boy, by far. I loved how it was a mixture of historical facts and fiction, it makes it much more enjoyable to read, and knowing that some of the horrible things actually happened makes it a bit more gripping. Though by the end of the book, I started to like The Morning Gift more than I originally did, I think it’s probably due to the relationship being almost perfect that it makes you want something like that.

I chose relationships as my theme, as I think that they were the main things that were affected by conflict. As conflict was something that ran throughout all of the books, I thought that it was only appropriate. I could have done other themes, but out of the ideas that I primarily wrote down, relationships was the most appealing, and the one I could write most about."

Susannah's impressive essay is now online here.

Extended Essay: Spinelli, Bailey, Ibbotson

The first Transition Year Extended Essay we're posting this year is a fine long piece by Amelia Shirley, which analyses three novels, Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl, Anne Bailey's Scars and Eva Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea. Amelia writes :-

The topic, on which I have decided to base my essay, is one that every single person in the world is able to relate to - Growing Up. As with most things, these two words bring a different thought or emotion or memory to each individual and that is why I have chosen it.

No matter how cultural or politically important it is for people to know about wars or elections or other related topics, I feel as though it is important for people to also know about “all the other stuff”, the more personal stuff, such as families, friendships and relationships. I, myself am fascinated by people’s upbringing; where they came from, their happy childhood memories, or perhaps not so happy ones.

I think it is important that people can see how valuable and tender the years that one spends as a child, really are. This is why I have chosen the theme of Growing Up to study for this essay.

Read Amelia's full Extended Essay here.

Ambrose, Hosseini, Boyne

More TY Extended Essay reading ...

Kate Boyd Crotty recommends John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (also recommended by Robbie Hollis earlier): "This book, set during World War II, is about a boy whose father is a Nazi. They move to a place near a concentration camp and the boy makes friends with a young Jew through the fence. I liked the book because it had a factual background, but also presented a fictional story at the same time. It was enjoyable and very sad at the same time as this historical tragedy actually happened, and some people's lives ended very cruelly. It tells how hard life was then and how oblivious some people were of what was going on."

Andrew Martin recommends Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (previously, Andy McCabe recommended the same author's The Kite Runner), and writes : "This book is about different peoples' struggle through Civil War in Afghanistan. It shows different relationships and how they can be affected by war. There are three different sections in the book; the first two deal with the stories of different people, and the third section we see those two people ending up together."

Finally, another war book : Bevan Nunan is reading Stephen Ambrose's non-fiction work Band of Brothers (which was turned into a TV series by Steven Spielberg, below):- "This is a factual book about World War II. Although it is factual, there is a lot more in it than facts. Ambrose concentrates on telling about the thoughts and relationships of the men, and how they grew to have their unique bond as a 'band of brothers'. He gives true insights into the spirits of the men and portrays the harsh realities of their experience. The intensity of war brought these men to hell, but they did not give up, never letting their fellow soldiers down. The telling of their struggle is emotional, a powerful piece of literature that is easy and interesting to read, not just for those who enjoy reading about war."