Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Ana's Story and the Freedom Writers - Comparison

Some weeks ago I reviewed a book written by teenagers called The Freedom Writers Diaries.

As any experienced writer would tell you - and newby writers have been told this over and over again - Write about what you know. Thats how the story is sold. By the emotion of experiencing something you personally know about.

The simple fact is that the Freedom Writers Diaries touched me much more deeply than Ana's Story did, because of the emotional langugage, and the obvious emotional connection. Those teenagers in Los Angeles lived with AIDS, abuse, gang fights, drugs, poverty and so on. It came across in their journals. Nothing like that came across in Ana's Story because the writer Jenna Bush, has not lived it.

She has not truely experienced what it is like to live under those conditions, and so thats why I had no choice but to give her first book a not-so-good review.

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