The Book I am reading is called Puddlejumpers, it is written by Jean Carlson. I received the book as a gift some years ago but I never got around to reading it so I thought why not now. Puddlejumpers starts out at Lakeside Home for Boys, a boys orphanage, in Chicago. Ernie, the main character is climbing out of the homes window to enjoy the cold Christmas Day snow and get away from Mrs. McGinty, the woman who runs Lakeside, whom he does not like one bit. The cold to me represents the cold he feels in his heart and the sadness he feels because the author talks about how Ernie hasn't been adopted in the ten years he has been at Lakeside and Mrs. McGinty blames him for that. You don't find much out much about the social conditions as we only see a few minutes in his day. I would say this current…show more content… At the end of the first chapter it ends with: “But, Christmas wasn't really his birthday, and Ernie wasn't even his real name.”(Carlson 5).
The next page changes the entire setting it flashes back, “12 Years, Nine Months and Five Days Earlier. . .”(Carlson 7). The mood changes immediately from cold, sad and lonely to warm, happier, and friendly. It starts out on the first day of spring at night, it's raining gently . It's the night a baby (Shawn aka Ernie, I know it's kinda confusing) is born. It then goes downhill as we are told Shawn’s mother dies while giving birth to him. Shawn’s father, Russ Frazier, goes through a tough week or two raising his son and dealing with the death of his wife Dolores, he only made it through with lots of help from his farming community around the Warbling River where they live. It picks up a few chapters away when Russ gets
