Plot Overview And Thematical Analysis Of A Novel Twisted By Laurie Halse Anderson

Plot

In the novel Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson we meet a young boy Tyler who is about to start his senior year, it starts off by telling us about tyler’s probation and what he did in order to get that, which was spray painting some colorful words on a statue and It also tells us about his dysfunctional family. In many chapters of the book it gives us details about tyler's suicidal tendencies and everything going wrong in his life, for example his relationship with bethany in the halloween party going all wrong, being blamed for things he did not do like taking disturbing pictures of a passed out bethany which caused him to get beat up by her brother chip and his friends, and his father losing his job. But in the end everything starts to look up for tyler with finally destroying his father's train station he was building to telling his father what he was about to do with his gun to them finally having a meal together as a family instead of his father going down into the basement, and him finally achieving the final score in the video game.

Themes

The two themes of the novel are anger and self development. Anger when his father was harassing him about his grades and his classes, when Tyler found Yoda his friend in the boys locker room being beat up by chip and his friends he felt a lot of anger and he wanted to beat them up because of what they were doing, he felt so much anger he had to calm himself by saying” Breathe. Just keep breathing. And kill the first thing you get your hands on (69). " or his anger when he was driving bethany, chip, and his friend parker home because they were drunk and bethany was making out with chip’s friend parker. The second theme in the novel was self development of how tyler acts in the beginning of novel to the end some examples are when he knows he needs to get over bethany because of the all the stuff that happened in the halloween party and the pictures that were taken of her and were blamed on him. Another example is when he is about to kill himself with his fathers shotgun but then looks at himself in the mirror and realized that he was about to end up like his father because his father had the shotgun and his life was falling apart and he’ll end up killing himself too so he doesn't. So he throws away the gun in the park and tries not go as the samedark path as his father and tries to change himself in a better way.

Extra Credit

Young adult, children and Historical novelist Laurie Halse Anderson was born in October 23,1961 in Potsdam, New York. Her early life she had an interest in writing at an early age but when she was growing up she never saw herself becoming a writer. In her final year of Fayetteville-Manlius High School she became an exchange student in a pig’s farm in Denmark and she learned a lot from that experience and when she came back to the U. S. she got herself a job earning minimum wage which gave her time to think about going back to college, she decided to go to a community college and transfer to a four year afterwards. After that she became a freelance journalist writing during this period of her time she started to write some books even though she was getting rejection letters for them, she still decided to publish her works though.