Group Book Selection Focus

We, Alli and Erika, have picked Ever by Gail Carson Levine. Ever is a fantasy and about Kezi, a beautiful mortal women, and Olus, the Akkan god of the wind. Throughout Ever, their love is put through highs and lows. This not the first time that we have heard of the author Gail Carson Levine: she wrote Ella Enchanted, one of Erika’s favorite books when she was younger. Also, fantasy and romance are two of our favorite genres. The fact that this book contains elements of both of these genres is one of the primary reasons we picked it. Another reason is because of the element of Greek mythology, a topic that interests us both and we know a good amount about. (We’ve both read the Percy Jackson series and Allison takes Latin.) Even though we know next to nothing about this book, the reviews have been very positive and we know people who have read the book (Allison’s mom and sister) and have said that it was a wonderful, spellbinding read. This positive feedback was another contributing factor to our book selection. One of our goals is to try to connect this to any prior knowledge that we have on relative topics. In Global, for example, we have studied the ancient Greek civliization in depth, and Alli takes Latin, so she had read and learned about a lot of the mythological creatures and heroes of the time period. Since this is a love story, there should be some concepts that are easily relatable to two teenage girls—our goal is to relate to those concepts to increase our understanding of Ever. Our last goal is to be able to find and identify archetypal themes and characters; this is probably the most interesting goal, as it requires us to be constantly aware of details in Ever.