iBoy

Letter to the author of iBoy

Dear Mr. Brooks,

first of all, we would like to thank you for writing the book “iBoy”. We are six students going to school in Backnang and we read your book during our English lessons.

From the very first words that were written on the pages, the reader is confronted with the crime scene in Crow Lane Estate. While reading further on, we got better informed about horrible events taking place in Tom’s district and we felt very concerned. This seemed surreal and we started to ask ourselves how it is possible that kids at our age become violent, start smoking and take drugs. But a question that is even more perplexing, is how can they ever exit this vicious circle they entered.

It is simply normal for us to have a safe life fulfilled with love, hope, dreams and chances. In contrast, Crow Lane kids have none of those, which is why we started to estimate our beautiful life.

One member of our group told us a fascinating story about a white woman in America who helped black kids to get out of crime and gave them a perspective. This is exactly what kids, who are violent and members of a gang, need. However, it takes a lot of courage and strength to act like this woman because it is related to risks and danger. Nevertheless, it is important to take this stepand help those lonely, violent and poor children.

Another lesson that your book taught us, was the lesson of morality. In our society, there are many values we often don’t recognize on first glance. One of this, is the question of what is right and wrong. While we sank further into reading, we started to understand that it is often not easy to decide and that the concept of right and wrong isn’t as clear cut through as Tom and we had thought.

The alert reader can also depict this personal development of Tom Harvey. In your book, the protagonist is two people at the same time. On the one hand, he is Tom Harvey, a normal 16- year old teenager and on the other hand, he is iBoy with special powers. As a result, Tom is torn in halves between iBoy and himself. There are many situations where he doesn’t know how to deal with this and what to do. At this point, we began to identify with Tom because in our daily life we don’t often know how to deal with situations and are torn in halves what to do. His aim is to help Lucy Walker and to take revenge on her rapists, but he realizes that there are many ways to do so. In the first half of the book, the protagonist is convinced that it is his obligation to use his special powers to hurt and take revenge on the rapists. Later, you can perceive a change. He develops and understands that Lucy will only love him, when Tom remains himself. With this thought he resists his revenge plans and his violence as iBoy.

This process clarifies the importance of being yourself and our group also realized that there is no universal right and wrong. By Tom Harvey we have learned that you should always be yourself, otherwise you make the wrong decisions. Through your book, we comprehend that this decision is a person’s individual choice and that it often takes longer to find this single right or wrong.

Besides, these were not the only lessons your book taught us. It also demonstrates how to deal with bad experience and cruel strokes of fate.Tom as well as Lucy have a very hard life and especially in the time as iBoy and the rape Tom and Lucy suffer a lot.

Rapes are always horrible and your book illustrates well how it destroys your personality and confidence. But it is important to pull yourself up again and get your self- confidence back. As your book has shown, you can never achieve this without friends or other help. Without Tom, Lucy would have always sat in her dark room and would have never come out again, just with his encouragement and help she started a new life. Unfortunately, in our modern world, people often are no “real” friends or are egoistic. This is a pity because without friendship or family members you can never get through such a situation. This also brings us to Tom who has grown up without a mother and a father but he got through it and could live with it because he had his lovely and careful “Gran” and Lucy. Your book made us think about friendship and the importance of it. It raised awareness and we thought about our friends. It told us to care for our friends, help them in difficult situations and always be there for each other because you will get the love back which you have given to them. Above all, we learned that you should always watch your surrounding carefully instead of drifting through it.

When we finally finished your book, we felt like we have just got off a roller coaster ride with so many impressions, feelings and thoughts. As we closed your book, everyone of us recognized that iBoy had taught us so many important life lessons, opened our eyes to new things and made us aware of things that should be changed in our world. Furthermore, it stimulated us to think about aspects we have never thought of and while reading we understood important phenomena for life.

Our personality didn’t really change because of your book but you extended our horizon and now we have more different points of views on topics such as friendship, dealing with hard strokes of fate and decision-making.

SuS Produkte iBoy: Herunterladen [docx][15 KB]

SuS Produkte iBoy: Herunterladen [pdf][101 KB]

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