While working in MJ's class on Literacies, we had two novels to study and read, The Quilt and Alek. Both are autobiography's but while Alek was written in first person type, The Quilt is written in third person which means that the author, Gary Paulsen is showing his childhood in a way without revealing himself as he calls himself the boy. After reading both books, MJ announced that not only did we have to make our own idividual project on comparisons between the two books but also a project on a book we chose ourselves. After a bit of consideration, i chose the book Maniac Magee, written by Jerry Spinelli. It is a story that shows how a average boy's life is suddenly changed after his parents died and had him go to his aunt and uncles home. Life still was not easy even after being sent their, his new parents hated eachother. 8 years of having to go through sharing two of everything with his aunt and uncle, he "ran away" If you want to know what happens next, i suggest you should read it, in my opinion, Jerry Spinelli and his books are masterpieces. Now back to business. My projects!!!

Link to my powerpoint. Maniac Magee Powerpoint.   

.............AND NOW.............

Many different title covers have been made for the book, but more importantly 13 years after the book was published, a TV movie was actually made for it. It has many of the same aspects but just in a different media with real actors. After reading many reveiws of the movie, i found that the majority of people were disapointed of how the movie had missed the Cobbles Knot scene, how Maniac's late friend Grayson was missing(who had originally taught Maniacs ticket to the McNab residence, how some chapters did not even match the movie scenes. Since i dont want to make the movies sound overly bad I will take a excerpt from a reveiw:  

"I adored this book as a kid. I also grew up in the town Twin Mills is based on (Jerry Spinelli's hometown, Norristown, Pa.) and I can guarantee you that the people who made the movie have never been to Norristown. They probably didn't even read the book.

It was much, much too happy and shiny with no sense of its story or setting. Norristown is a bleak town divided by racial tensions; the story of Maniac is one boy making a difference. The movie is a trite little piece of shiny Nickelodeon crap."

You can now understand that how disapointed of the movie some people are.
But reading the book is a double win because it has such strong topics on racism that shows how some people behaved in the past and has plenty of darkly humourous parts in a mesh of page turning goodness !