Overview of The Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James takes place during a Christmas Eve gathering at a very old house.

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The guest listened to one another telling their stories. One of the guest, Douglas, tells a story about two kids. He starts off the story by reading a written record of the strange experience. He continues on reading how the governess was walking around the grounds and sees a guy in the tower. She then also see the same man looking in the dining room window. She is then frightened and thinks that the ghost will harm the kids. Every night she sees a ghost in her room. To find out what happens in the end, go ahead and check the book out from the library! It's a very good book if you like to read horror books.

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The characters include:

The governess: She is a 20 year old women who has put in charge to watch over Flora and Miles who are the kids of Bly. She feels like she has a lot of responsibility for watching over the kids since she has no help or supervision of watching them. The governess is very intelligent but is also sensitive about her feelings. I would say she is a protagonist.

Mrs. Grose: She is a servant who is also the governess's friend. She treats the governess with great respect. Mrs. Grose is very patient when it comes to listening and is very caring when it comes to Flora and Miles.

Miles: He is 10 years old. He is very charming and attractive for his young age. Miles is very behaved and never gets into fights with his sister and always seems to be pleasing the governess. He got expelled from school for a sinister reason. He seems to be good most of the time, but he like most boys, have their bad sad.

Flora: She is 8 years old. She is very beautiful and well mannered. Everyone says she is a pleasure to be around. The governess loves Flora since she always has a smile on her face.

The book was overall good! The thing that I thought was weird was that they told ghost stories on Christmas Eve. That seemed weird to me because usually people share memories of the good ol' days and old memories of Christmas, not ghost stories. Anyways, I thought this was a pretty good book. On a scale of 1-5, I would give it a 3.5 if you like ghost stories. Some parts were very creepy and gave me goosebumps! Here are some other reviews I found on this book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12948.The_Turn_of_the_Screw

http://www.litlovers.com/book-reviews/28-great-works/8368-turn-of-the-screw-review

Semester Reflection

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My favorite piece of literature we have read has got to the the Canterbury Tales. Some of the tales we read were pretty funny, especially the Woman of Bath. I liked the way Chaucer wrote about the characters. You could really tell if he liked them or not. He had a great imagination for making all of that stuff up!

The literature that I didn't really like was Oedipus the King. I was a good story but I got really bored during it. It was also a very weird story! Who would marry their mother and have kids with her? That's really weird and gross!

The things I enjoyed most in class was the RWLD's and reading the stories in class. I think reading it in class was better for me because then I understood the story better than reading it on my own. Blogging is also fun to do! We get to create our own blog and every Friday we had a blogging day!

Overall, I enjoyed this class! We got to read stories from different ages and from different parts of the world. I don't think I would change anything about this class! Mrs. Olson is a great teacher and taught us a lot about literature!