Book Review: Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson

An athlete, a brilliant student, a minister's daughter.

Kate Malone is every one of these, a tall order to execute. The chemistry lover's life ironically falls apart at Merryweather High School in Syracuse, New York, like the fission of Uranium- 235#; her life was perfectly fitting together as nature intended, but MIT denied Kate's acceptance and, boom.

A nuclear explosion of Kate's life landed her arch enemy, Teri Litch, into her house. Her seemingly perfect life twists unexpectedly with taking care of a child and ensuring her brother takes his medication and doing the family's laundry and being the mother the family needs and secretly dealing with the rejection from her dream school: MIT.

Laurie Halse Anderson writes Catalyst to tell the world even in a seemingly bad situation, unforeseen results can turn out better than expected, to tell the world people can change, and you should get to know a person before you make assumptions about them, and to tell the world how preparation is vital to controlled results.

Anderson uses chemistry terminology to name each chapter and sub chapter, but Catalyst is not a nonfiction novel; Catalyst is YA novel that incorporates science to develop Kate's personality and character.

Kate learns that life isn't always what it seems, for herself or the people around her she thought she knew, similarly to how John Green portrays his message in Looking for Alaska.

No matter if you enjoy chemistry or don't know what an atom* is, Catalyst tells a tale relatable to any reader.

Key
* a basic unit of matter that consists of a dense central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. The atomic nucleus contains a mix of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons (except in the case of hydrogen-1, which is the only stable nuclide with no neutrons).

# a light isotope of uranium of mass number 235 that constitutes less than one percent of natural uranium, that when bombarded with slow neutrons undergoes rapid fission into smaller atoms with the release of neutrons and energy, and that is used in nuclear reactors and atomic bombs.

Third Quarter Independent Reading Reflection

Lexicon by Max Berry
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson
Legend by Marie Lu
The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey

Last quarter my goals that I set for third quarter were reading five books and reading at least one non fiction/ memoir this quarter. As you can see from the list above, I met my goal of reading 5 books, but did not get around to reading a non fiction book. I was extremely busy this quarter with two-a-day workouts for softball, and I think I underestimated how little extra time I would have. I also think that I struggled finding a non fiction book that I would be interested in and not feel like a chore to read, which prevented me from meeting that goal.

This upcoming quarter, I want to read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr because many of my friends have read it and have really enjoyed it. I want to at least meet the number of books I read this quarter (5) or exceed it by reading more than five.

Point of View- Rick Reilly

       Rick Reilly is a sports columnist who in the past wrote the final column in Sports Illustrated and Reilly moved to ESPN in 2008, where he was featured as a columnist for ESPN.com and wrote the last column for ESPN the Magazine. In his columns “The Weak Shall Inherit the Gym” and “Sis! Boom! Bah! Humbug!”, Reilly suggests that he writes sports columns because he referencesdodgeball and cheerleading. I chose Reilly because I enjoyed Max Berry’s columns that we read in class, and I like reading about sports.
      In his columns, Reilly implements the figurative language technique of hyperbole. Reilly voices his opinion about dodgeball’s place in schools’ gym classes. He emphasizes his opinions when he references that if they take dodgeball away, the following activities will be next: “Baseball. Involves wrong-headed notions of stealing, errors, and gruesome hit-and-run. Players should always be safe, never out. Hopscotch. Sounds vaguely alcoholic, not to mention demeaning to our friends of Scottish ancestry” (The Weak). Here, Reilly exaggerates the effect of taking dodgeball away from schools. Even though you know that this is an obvious exaggeration, while reading it you picture these hyperboles being put into place and realize that there is more importance of dodgeball than meets the eye. In his other column, he talks about how he believes that cheerleading is not a sport, and the stereotypical cheerleader persona that many embrace during their high school and college years. Reilly is talking about now there are cheer gyms and cheerleading championships on ESPN now, and writes, “This is the event in which 408 girls named Amber attempt to create a human Eiffel Tower” (Sis! Boom!). Reilly critiques the societal development that cheerleading has had on young girls that choose to become cheerleaders. He also pokes fun at cheerleaders, though admitting that his sisters used to cheer at a young age. In both of his columns, Reilly uses hyperboles to relay to the reader his strong feelings about dodgeball and cheerleading. These exaggerations show how strongly Reilly detests the exclusion of dodgeball and how ridiculous he believes cheerleading to be.

Things I Learned Last Year

Spiders, however small they may be,
still scare teenage girls tremendously.

Sometimes you can pick things up
without opposable thumbs.

Gregory House took pain meds
for his extremely real leg pain.
But he got addicted to Vicodin,
and he doesn't even need it anymore.

Oprah Winfrey sponsors Weight Watchers,
yet she still has to work on her own fitness.

Hello. It's me. After all these years,
I guess Adele felt sorry for breaking his heart.

When I face death, because it's inevitable,
I want it to be quick.
Like squishing a creepy, crawly spider.
Quick. Painless.

In Kentucky, men are paid to catch ants for
Uncle Milton's Ant Farm Company.
They breed ants. To sell to children.

In my imitation poem, I did just that. I tried to mimic Stafford's Things I Learned Last Week by trying to keep the similar ideas/themes that he used in each stanza and parallel them in my poem. For example, I used a nature topic of spiders for my first stanza, as Stafford used ants. I even tried to use the same number of lines for each stanza that he used; a 2,2,4,2,2,4,3 pattern of the number of lines per stanza. Since I tried to imitate Stafford fairly directly, I attempted to use similar tone that he used for each stanza. For my third, fourth, and fifth stanzas, I tried to use a more lighthearted tone, whereas in stanza 6, there is a more serious tone because of the morbid topic of death. I think that this poem clearly reflects my 2015, representing my binge watching of House M.D. on Netflix, or hearing Hello for 2,000 times. Or even more recently, seeing Oprah on her new commercials for Weight Watchers. 2015 taught me about some celebrities, but also life lessons that anyone could benefit from.