tadpole

Last term, we read the novel Fortress in class. And did A LOT of work on it. Questions to all the 17 chapters. Vocabulary list. Character chart. Other worksheets on characters. One essay on character study. One in class essay on theme. Spelling and comprehension tests. We handed in the whole assignment last week and I tell you - I feel that I know the characters in the book better than I know my real life friends.

My book doesn’t look quite like this. But this is the version I found on the internet:

The novel was based on a true story. Well, sort of. 10% of it was true. 90% was fiction.

What’s the book about? In a nutshell, the novel Fortress by Gabrielle Lord is about four armed kidnappers abducting a young female school teacher and her twelve students. Early in the morning, the kidnappers with their cartoon characters masks on, head into the one-room country school and win over many children’s heart with their childish masks. The kidnappers leave them in a cave far away from any kind of civilisation and plan on demanding one million dollars ransom to have the teacher and the dozen kids returned safely…

Sally, the teacher, is not prepared to stay in the cave, waiting to be starved and killed. She figures out a plan to escape from the cave. It’s not an easy job but they work together to achieve success. They are free but not for long. The kidnappers soon recapture Sally and the children in a neat cottage where Father Christmas, the leader of them four kidnappers, shoots an old man to bits and locks an injured old woman in a cupboard to starve. Sally is more scared than ever but she is determined to escape, she is determined to protect the children from any danger. During their journey to freedom, they hurt themselves, they kill, they shoot, they turn their cave into a fortress, they defend it and they act like barbarians…

My opinion? The plot was unpredictable yet logical. And I think that all the characters were very convincing and they were as though plucked out of real life. Gabrielle Lord had also developed the themes of the story very well. Creating horror and suspense in a story is one of the hardest things to do but Lord had achieved this in her novel. She explored adjectives to create a chill atmosphere and she had a good knowledge of psychology will. Horror and suspense come from bizarre and she had used the abnormal, the unexpected to evoke these feelings. I always thought that too violent murders in a story will lose their fright. But Lord had written this book so beautifully that even though she used a lot of blood and gore, the story still didn’t lose its fright. The action that took place to resolve the conflict was also very well written.

An amazing book. I thoroughly, highly recommend this book to young adults who have a thirst for suspenseful books!

And guess what? We just finished watching the movie version of Fortress. And we have to do more work on it. Oh my god. Fortress. Sally. Father Christmas. Tom. Sid. Kidnapping. All over again…

The movie was just ok. Nothing special. Nothing amazing. I guess it’s hard to make a movie involving little kids.

The novel was good. I enjoyed it. The movie was fine. I didn’t mind it. Yeah.