My January/February Independent Reading book was Leon’s Story by Leon Walter Tillage, and the genre of this book is nonfiction (autobiography). I thought that this was an amazing book and I would recommend this to my peers. This book is about the perspective of the author growing up when he was younger. The overall theme of this book is racism. In Leon’s Story the setting is in the 1930’s where they live on a farm in order for his dad to pay off debts by share-cropping in North Caroline. There are certainly many different conflicts in this book but overall it has to do with racism and the unfair Jim Crow laws (Characters vs Society). This story is sad; it talks about the racism that African-Americans had to deal with at the time and gives a lot of examples of it. The protagonist in the book is Leon; he is friendly to everyone including whites and tries to do everything right and strongly believes that everyone should be equal. But the antagonists are mostly all white people. They’re the antagonists in this book because they hate all African- Americans including Leon and his family just because of skin color, and would even go to the extent of killing them because they don’t like their skin color. This book was short, and fast paced, yet detailed. This book had good details; the author did a good job of explaining everything very clearly, which made the book a lot more interesting. Here is an excerpt of the book so you can see what the author’s writing style is like, “I remember that as a young boy I used to look in the mirror and I would curse my color, my blackness.” Overall this book taught me a lot about how horrible racism was back then. I would definitely recommend this book if you want to read something short and fast paced that will also help you learn a lot more about racism. Sincerely,
Shoaib Omed
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