Book review where the mountain meets the moon A Wish that you wish, will give you the motivation to conquer that wish.” “Where The Mountain Meets The Moon”, a fascinating fantasy book crossed with the Chinese folklore written by Grace Lin, is an amazing book to read. If you start, it will bring the desire to read the book, to find out what happens next. Now as a recommender, I would like to promise you that this book will not upset you. Furthermore, as you are reading, not only you will feel the curiosity of what’s going to happen in the future, but you will also gain the knowledgeable theme. Now, in every book, there is always a meaningful theme. And so right now, I take it as, you are wondering what the theme is, right? In this book, it …show more content…
In the beginning, the book introduces the protagonist named Minli, a young girl that’s filled with happiness and brightness, but lives in a poor village. Beside the village, there is a mountain called the fruitless mountain, and it’s called fruitless mountain because nothing grows nor birds go on that mountain and a river called the Jade River (it is named after the first dragon). One day, Minli buys a goldfish from the goldfish man, hearing that goldfish will bring you fortune. Once Minli bought the goldfish and notified to her parents, saying that it will bring us fortune, Minli’s Ma became atrociously angry with Minli’s Pa, that he’s telling Minli too much fake fairy-tale, and now she is believing in those legends. Every day, and night, Minli fed her rice to the goldfish that she bought. Now, before we go more ahead, Papa once told Minli about the old man of the moon, and that he can answer any question in the world. (Back to the story.) But one day, Minli finds out that the goldfish that she bought can speak! (Watawawow!) And the important thing is that the goldfish knows where to find the old man of the moon. Very determined, Minli leaves her village without notifying her Ma, and Pa in the night in the night, to ask the old man of the moon how she can fix her village’s fate (how to let her village become wealthy, not poor). So on, during her adventure, she finds a dragon that can’t fly, stuck! Feeling like she needs to …show more content…
“I think,” Dragon said slowly, “I am not destined to see the old man of the moon… I wish I could fly… “You will,” Minli said ... The bridge is strong and big for me. I’ll ask the old man of the moon your question and return” (pg. 234). Wow, a sign of a great friendship right here. But this isn’t it. An unexpected situation happens, and now it is up to Minli but it seems as that she can’t easily make a decision. Which question will she ask? Her village’s fate, or the dragon’s fate to ask how he can fly. Very hard to choose, but she chooses the question that is unexpected, by us the
Kherdian, David, and Cheng'en Wu. Monkey: A Journey to the West : a Retelling of the Chinese Folk Novel. Boston: Shambhala, 2005. Print.
The novel is about two teenagers. "Luo, who is good a story telling and an unnamed narrator, "a fine violin player" who are sent to be re-educated after the Chinese cultural revolution. They are sent to a mountain called "Phoenix of the Sky because their parents were publicly denounced and recognized as enemies of people. The general idea behind the Cultural Revolution was element of control. And Mao thought that all intellectuals were a thread to his power. The reason for that was that most of the intellectuals had the ability to think for themselves. Mao foun...
...n” is a great example of an old myth or tale reconstructed and adapted for a modern audience in a new medium. It is a progression on one hand in its use of modern language, setting, and style but it is also the product of the old myths in that it is essentially the same on the thematic level. In addition, the level of self-awareness on the part of the narrator and, by extension, the author marks it out as an illustration of the very notion of evolutionary changes of myths and fairy tales. Adaptation is the solution to the fairy tale, and fairy tales have been endlessly changing themselves throughout history and, by some strange transforming or enchanting power endlessly staying the same.”
I will also be showing how fairytales can sometimes have extended meanings and how they can teach quit a lot. I will have also shown how Fairytales can serve cultural functions to explain a society to itself, revealing its own mechanisms and taboos in highly symbolic language, images.
Introduction: The novel Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan follows the hapless journey of twelve Bay Area tourists destined for Burma, accompanied by the ghost of their dear friend Bibi Chen, who died under “mysterious circumstances” just before the departure. The journey continues in a downward spiral until eleven of the tourists go out on a misty lake one morning and disappear. Miss Chen, the omniscient voice of the book, is caught between two worlds and is along for this journey. It isn’t until the end of the book that readers realize many events that occur are actually a metaphor for human relations; and the central theme is that the line between reality and fantasy can be tricky to discern, and things can be vastly different from
The struggle for superiority can sometimes grow too intense. In Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger, she illustrates a scene with two siblings scaling a cliff at the beach as they search for fossils. Once Claudia sees her brother Gordon find something, she desires to reach the top of the cliff in hopes of finding a wealth of these fossils. As she attempts to pass Gordon to reach the top, he tries to block her path, and she ends up slipping and falling to the ground below. Their mother, Edith Hampton, attempts to calm her children and help Claudia regardless of her exhaustion. Lively uses literary devices such as diction, personification, imagery, repetition, and selection of details to dramatize the complex relationships among the family
It begins with a happy 9-year-old girl named Ling who lives in a hospital complex with her father, a very successful surgeon, and her mother, a well-known doctor. Her mother, known as Mrs. Chang, is very strict, always nagging Ling to act like a woman and to be perfect in almost every way. Ling believes it is because her mother never wanted to have a daughter. Father, on the other hand, Mr. Chang, spent much time with Ling, and got very close to her, teaching her reading and English lessons. He would
The Tale of Kieu is the most popular and adored Vietnamese literary work to date. It is a beautiful epic poem composed by Nguyen Du. The epic tells a breathtaking story of the woes of a young girl named Kieu. Through the life of Kieu, Du explores the concept of how much of our lives are preordained by fate or the cosmos, and how much is free will. From beginning to end, readers are captivated by the main character’s misfortune, resilience, and strong moral character. The Tale of Kieu is a riveting read that will challenge readers to think deeper about concepts such as fate, destiny, and karma.
The fairy tale begins with a miller betrothing his daughter to the first suitable man who comes along. The man choosen happens to live deep in the forest, and fills the daughter with dread everytime that she sees him. One day, the suitor demands that his bride come visit him at home. When she tells him she does not know the way, he says he with spread the path to his house with ashes. Nodoubt this fictional element is meant to invoke sadistic images of Nazi Germany and the use of ashes of cremated concentration camp inmates for road construction. The daughter does follow the path with great unease, however, as she follows the path she marks it with peas. She finally comes to the house, and is promptly warned by a bird that she is entering a house of murderers. The girl enters and house and finds it almost entirerly deserted. However, in the basement she finds an old women who repeats the bird’s warning. The crone then prphesizes that the girl will marry death and her bridegroom only seeks to kill her, cut her pieces up, and eat her. As the two prepare to escape, the bridegroom and his band of theives return with maiden [virgin]. The old woman hides the girl behind a large barrel. From her hiding place, she whitnesses the thieves give the maiden three glasses of wine to stop her heart. They then rip her clothes off, and hack the body into pieces with axes. On of the murders notices the girl wears a gold band, but cannot pull it off her finger. He cuts off thefinger which flies from the table and lands in the girls lap. Before the thieve can look for it, the crone offers them some wine, which she has laced with a sleeping potion. The thieves fall prey to the potion and sleep deeply. The g...
The idea that resulted in the Little Seamstress leaving the mountain maybe viewed as ironic by the reader. The ideas of being different and individual, that Lou held and put to practice were what communist Leader Chair man Mao Zedong originally feared. This was why the texts were originally banned in the first place, and viewed as revolutionary trash. As it was thought that they may result in an u...
This modern fairy tale contains diverse characters but none of them is as important as the grandmother. Through her narration, the reader gets all the information needed to understand the story. Indeed, by telling her own story she provides the reader the familial context in which the story is set with her granddaughter and her daughter but even more important, she provides details on her own life which should teach and therefore protect her grand-daughter from men, and then save her to endure or experience her past griefs. This unnamed grand-mother is telling her life under a fairy tale form which exemplify two major properties of fairy tale, as mentioned by Marina Warner in “The Old Wives' Tale”: “Fairy tales exchange knowledge [through the moral] between an older [most of the time feminine] voice of experience and a younger audience”. As suggested in the text, fairy tales are a way to teach insights of life through simple stories directed to, most of the time, younger generations. Most of the time because fairy tales work on different levels of moral which are directed to categories of people, for instance in “Little Red Riding Hood” the moral ...
At first glance, what makes a fairy tale a fairy tale may seem obvious—some kind of magic, hidden symbols, repetition, and of course it’s evident it’s fiction—but fables are more than that. As Arthur Schelesinger puts it, it’s about “[expanding] imagination” and gaining understanding of mysterious places (618). While doing this, it also helps children to escape this world, yet teach a lesson that the reader may not be conscious of. A wonderful story that achieves all of this is Cinderella, but not the traditional tale many American’s have heard. Oochigeaskw, or The Rough-Faced Girl, and Ashputtle would be fitting for a seven-year-old because they get the gears of the mind turning, allowing for an escape on the surface, with an underlying enlightenment for children of the ways of the world.
When the emperor sent out a request to send the men in China to war, Mulan was scared. Her father was one of the many men summoned to fight....
In this story, we are presented with a talking fish who grants wishes. Fairy tales teach their audience that bad things can happen to anyone by anyone in a safe environment. That safe environment is constructed through magic. It is comforting to know that in the end the story goes back to the beginning and that things always lead to safety, instead of ending with punishment, or worse. Magic is also a source of comic relief in tales, where heavier topics like murder or in the case of “The Fisherman and His Wife” a war of the sexes and greed are explored. Mainly, fairy tales like this one teach us how to distinguish between right and wrong because the good is always rewarded and the bad is punished. By returning the couple to their pisspot, the fairy tale teaches its audience about humility as well as the importance of being
"There is a wonderful fable about a young orphan girl who had no family and no one to love her. One day, feeling exceptionally sad and lonely, she was walking through the meadow when she noticed a small butterfly caught unmercifully in a thornbush. The more the butterfly struggled to free itself, the deeper the thorns cut into the butterfly from its captivity. Instead of flying away, the little butterfly changed into a beautiful fairy. The young girl rubbed her eyes in disbelief.