Your Friendly Neighborhood In Canada

                                                                  The Tuesday Cafe

I just finished a novel called The Tuesday Café. I thought it was a long story although it was much shorter than other students. I didn’t expect that I was going to finish the novel. However the words in the story were not too hard to understand and I felt like reading it so I decided to finish. As a result, I finished the whole book a lot faster than I thought. It’s really an interesting novel. When I finished it, I felt like I’d gone into the life of the main character, Harper, because the author used a first person point of view to write the story. That really impressed me. Harper is a funny guy so I do like him. Also he is a good writer, but he doesn’t know that at first. However his life changes when he meets those people in The Tuesday Café, a writing-learning class and his counsellor, Ms. Davis. That’s what I am going to tell you: What goes in the story and how I felt about it when I read it.

     The story opened, I didn’t understand what was happening because Harper is in a courtroom already. Then I learned he is there because he’d started a fire in a garbage can at school. I couldn’t wait to know what would happen to him. He starts the fire because he is mad that he has to clean the locker room again for no reason. It really surprised me that such a small thing could make him start the fire. Although he is really mad at something, I still don’t agree with him. He could have burned down the whole school and killed all the teachers and students. A lot of people are just like him in this world. They are not really evil, but just because they mad at something, then they killed people, even their parents or themselves. That’s really terrible. They lose their mind so they start doing something stupid. Then after that, they regret it. What does all this mean? Why couldn’t they have thought about it first? They should find another way, a right way to solve their problem, shouldn’t they? If they have thought about all the things carefully, will terrible things happen? I don’t think so.

    In addition, I was really glad that he doesn’t burn down the entire school or he might have to go to jail for the rest of his life. It gives him a chance to change his life. The judge gives him a punishment that he has to write a two-thousand-word essay on how he is going to turn his life around in one month and he can ask someone for help if he wants, but the person can not write for him. That is really interesting. The made me feel like finding out what he was going to write. His mom takes him to a place called The Tuesday Café. It is a writing class. His mom hopes that could help him write the essay. The people in the class all are adults. However he does well in that class and the people in the class all like him. He makes friends there which he didn’t do at school. It is really weird because he has no problem with making friends, but he doesn’t make any friends at school. I think he just doesn’t want to. He is distant to the people at school and he still thinks it isn’t his problem. It tells me people don’t usually know their own problem because they don’t really look at themselves. They need someone to tell them what their problem is. However some of them still don’t believe what they have heard. They think the problem is not theirs. We really should understand ourselves first before we want to understand others. If you can’t solve your problem, how do you help solve other people’s problem?

     Furthermore, his parents don’t spend a lot of time at home. They have their jobs to do and they are really busy. His brother and sister are much older than his is and they have gotten married so he is usually alone in the house. He always stays in his room. That’s why he doesn’t really spend time with his family. Also that’s why he doesn’t get along with his parents, because they don’t understand each other. It reminds me of something, when I was a child, sometimes I was upset about something that my parents didn’t understand. Because I didn’t tell them what I felt, what I wanted, how could they understand me? We didn’t even talk. The point is, we should talk. We need to spend some time to communicate with our parents. It’s our family that we spend most of our life with. We need to understand what everyone is thinking. Why can Harper do so well and make friends in The Tuesday Café? It was because they are all in the same class; they are all in the same room. They have to talk to each other. They have to share their writing with the class. The point is they do really communicate with each other.

    Harper’s counselor is called Ms. Davis. He has to meet her twice a week for the forty hours of community service work at his school. It is a punishment, too. It is really funny the first time Harper meets her. He lies to her that he started the fire because of his dog and he cries in front of her like is was real. In fact, he doesn’t have a dog; he just wants to have one. However Ms. Davis has already heard that from his parents before he comes. I can tell he is a smart person, but it doesn’t mean a smart person won’t do stupid things. Smart is not always a good thing if you use it in the wrong way. Smart people’s problems aren’t less than stupid people’s, because they always think they are dong the right thing and they don’t listen when people tell them it’s wrong.

    Harper learns a lot of things from The Tuesday Café and his counselor, Ms. Davis. Actually everyone in that class used to have their own problems, but they all deal with them at that point so I think Harper has to deal with his, too. Also the teacher in the class helps him a lot. His teacher finds out that He is a good writer. He doesn’t know that because he has never showed his writing to anyone in his past. Also Ms. Davis helps him a lot, too. She tells him how to deal with his problem. At last he shows the letter that he writes from The Tuesday Café to his parents. His parents know that they both feel empty because they don’t even talk. After that, his parents want to spend more time with him then he can communicate more with them. He finishes the essay in the last few days and his life has already changed. In our life, we should really make some friends. They can find out what our problem is and help us, but first we should communicate with them and let them understand us.

    On conclusion, it is really an impressive novel. I learned a lot of things from the story. I am glad that he can really talk about himself with his parents. Any problem can be solved, but at first you should find it. I’m not as great a writer as Harper, but I can feel what he feels when finishes his essay because I am so glad that I finished my response journal. It’s just like a big rock has already moved away from me.