YA Reading Response "It's Kind of A Funny Story"

From many stories and past experiences we can learn that different people that we meet can impact us, sometimes these impacts are positive and sometimes negative. One book that can teach us about how different people have impacts on us is It’s Kind of A Funny Story by Ned Vizzini it is about a teenager named Craig Gilner who has just go into an incredible high school, but when he gets there he faces many issues in his life, (drugs, excessive homework, and he’s not eating) but in his life he has people who are there for him and either makes him strive to be the best, or people who are trying to harm him and make him uncomfortable.

Some things that affect Craig negatively are the people who he calls “Friends” and his school

life, these two things inflict things that are really harm Craig as a person. His “friends” are Nia and Aaron, who are dating,  and they are mean and they get Craig to start doing drugs. One example of them giving him drugs is the day that they all get their invitation letter to the high school that they want to go to and Aaron has a party at his house, and Aaron tells him just to do it once. “Smoke. Celebrate.’/ I stopped. / ‘If any time is the time it’s now.’/ I nodded./… He explained how you ‘have to take the smoke into your lungs, not your stomach - don’t swallow it Craig, that’s how hits get lost’ - and how to let it go as slowly as you could through your mouth or nose. The key was to hold it in as long as possible.  But you didn’t want to hold it too long. then you coughed.“ This is an example of how Aaron isn’t only getting him addicted to a dangerous drug, but also peer pressuring him to do something that he doesn’t want to do, and this is just horrible to watch. Another thing that impacts him negatively is his school. Besides the fact that everyone hates school, his school is really hurting him. School is making him depressed, and from the very first page he tells us that he doesn’t enjoy talking because he wants to kill himself. Then later on he tells us “I don’t like to smoke pot ,but then I do smoke it and I get depressed.” In the last piece of evidence we found out that he started smoking when he got into high school, due to the fact that he has so much homework he has continued to “smoke pot” and it’s just making him so depressed to the level that he wants to kill himself. So this is how we can see that in Craig Gilner has some challenges that make his life more difficult.

Although Craig has all of this negativity in his life there are a few things that help him in his life to make him feel better like his mother and Noelle, a girl that Craig meets after he puts himself into a psychiatric hospital before he's about to kill himself. His mother makes him feel better because she sweet and helpful. One of the things that Craig likes to do is draw maps, and he started drawing maps when he was younger, and when he couldn't draw them perfectly he got very upset and had a temper tantrum. His mother told him "Craig' she sighed, looked at me. 'I have an idea. Instead of spending your time trying to trace maps of Manhattan, why don't you make your own maps of imaginary places?" This is an example of his mother being very kind to him because it hard to explain to a child that human error is inevitable when it comes to drawing something that was made computer generated. So here is mother was doing small Craig a favor, by giving something that he enjoys doing which is very hard to do all considering that he's so depressed that he won't even eat. Another person that makes him feel better about staying on the face of the earth is a girl named Noelle, she was put in the psychiatric hospital because she cut her face in odd contortions. In the hospital Craig and Noelle have become very close to the point in which they start dating. By Noelle dating Craig doesn’t only make him happy because he’s liked, but he also he had watched his friend date someone for 2 years and he’d been the third wheel, but now he doesn’t have to be so lonely. Noelle also gives him life advice, when she catches Craig making out with Nia, Aarons ex-girlfriend, she gets really upset. And when Craig apologizes she says that saying sorry won’t make it better, but you have to compliment them, and because Craig has never learned to be nice to someone (because in the book he has a lot of of trouble complementing people) and now Noelle is giving him this piece of knowledge that will help Craig a better person.

Although Craig Gilner has many problems in his life the amount of nice things and people that live around him should make happier than the things that brings him down. So in our life there are probably things that keep us down, but there are people in this world that make us feel better. And those people that make us happy will make sure that we aren’t put down by those people that don’t make us happy. In Craig’s case because he had his mother and Noelle he was able to not as depressed, without them in his life then he might have killed himself and then he would have hurt more people than him hurting himself.