I sometimes hang out on r/homeworkhelp, because sometimes people have genuine questions that I can answer. But the number of people who just want you to do their work for them is out of control.
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Book Report due tomorrow...Here's what I wrote in response:
...that I haven't started for the same reason everyone else last-minutes homework. Anyway, I don't want this done for me, I just need some information on the book (Mine Eyes Have Seen by Ann Rinaldi) so that I can write a decent sized summary. Thanks, for any and all help.
Mine Eyes Have Seen by Ann Rinaldi has a story about a girl who was alive in 1859 during the battle of Harper's Ferry and wrote down her experiences in her diary. A hundred years later, the book is discovered by a young boy living during the Cold War, who reflects on her story and its relevance to his own life.I decided to post it here because I have no idea if the mods will delete it, and I just spent a good twenty minutes of my life working on it.
Rinaldi uses both historical and fantastical elements to weave her story about family love, religion, patriotism, and guilt. The heroine, Annie Brown, was a real person, but Rinaldi embellishes on her life in order to make the story more like a historical fable. While her father is a deeply religious man, Annie has special abilities that she fears would cause her father to see her as a witch. The book's title is named for one of those abilities: She can remove her eyes and leave them, unnoticed, in small hiding spaces, giving her the ability to spy on the political activities that are going on around her. It is while she is spying on a meeting that she discovers her father is involved in guerilla actions against the Union, and Annie is torn between her loyalty to her country, and her love of her father. The battle of Harper's Ferry itself almost destroys both, and she regrets until her death that she did nothing.
The parallels to the boy, whose name is Frank, are obvious. Frank is living during the Cold War, and suspects that his parents are secret communists. Although Frank is not able to remove his own eyes from the sockets and put them onto bookshelves in order to spy on others, he does have the uncanny ability to talk to fruit flies--mutated during the series of nuclear tests taking place in his state--who tell him that his mother and father speak Russian and read books that have pictures of Russian leaders on them. Frank is not sure, however, if he is being told the truth; after all, fruit flies cannot speak and so they have no way to know whether it's really Russian or is in fact just normal English spoken after slightly one two many vodkas. They also are not very good at facial recognition.
Frank realizes the lesson of Annie's life and takes action, however. Instead of being paralyzed by his inability to choose between his parents and his country, which he knows will lead to the eventual loss of both, he decides to pick his country. He turns in his parents to the authorities, and they are arrested for being spies. It's then that he finds out his legal name is is in fact Fedor. However, he is now comfortable in his loyalty to his country and is able to deal with this revelation.
The moral of the book is that when our loyalties are divided we must choose according to what we think is right, and that standing by and doing nothing is never going to have good results. However, if we act with conviction we will have some control over our fate and become stronger as people.
(I hope that helps. I don't mind if you just copy and paste it.)
