Post 6: Book 3 Listicle

4 Reasons You Should Know Something is up from the Beginning
Note: Many spoilers are stated, so if you plan on reading this book in the future, I suggest you don't continue. Consider yourself warned.

            Shutter Island is a mystery thriller novel by Dennis Lehane about a hospital for the criminally insane set in the 1950s. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule have been assigned to Shutter Island to try and find out how Rachel Solando had escaped, and where she has gone. However, nothing seems to be quite right on the island, leaving many questions from the very beginning.

Reason 1: Teddy is throwing up in the very first scene
              "Teddy started the trip down on his knees in front of the toilet, heaving into the bowl as the ferry's engine chugged and clacked and Teddy's nasal passages filled with the oily smells of gasoline and the late-summer sea." (Lehane 11) At first, this event seems completely irrelevant to the story. He gets sea sick. So what? However, we don't find out until the very end what is really going on here. Teddy was drugged, and the drugs are making him sick. It didn't seem it when you first read it, but this is a very fishy situation.

Reason 2: Teddy meets his new partner on the ship to Shutter Island
              Not only have the two marshals never met before, they never had a mission briefing, they met just before they reach their destination, and Chuck was just transferred to Massachusetts from Seattle, knowing little about Teddy. This also seemed a little fishy, but I didn't need to know the ending to know this was fishy. No two marshals just meet before their mission destination. It just doesn't happen.

Reason 3: Their guns are taken from them
              This may not play a major role in the plot line of the book, but it made me think twice about the jail and what it is doing. If you were a U.S. marshal, I would think you would be allowed to take your gun anywhere you choose. But McPherson insisted they hand them over. "Chuck looked at Teddy. Teddy shook his head." (Lehane 29) Even though it affected them hardly any at all, I still found it to be slightly fishy.

Reason 4: McPherson talks about experimentation
              He may not state it directly, but McPherson talks about experimenting on patients. He says, "In a less enlightened age, a patient like Gryce would have been put to death. But here they can study him, define a pathology, maybe isolate the abnormality in his brain that caused him to disengage so completely from acceptable patterns of behavior." (Lehane 34-35) When he says this, readers think he is talking about precise measurements, and behavioral exams to figure out why the patients acted the way they did. However, we later learn exactly what they are doing to these patients, and how horrible it is. So this is another instance where it doesn't seem fishy at the time, but when we learn about it later, it all makes sense.


This is a story that has many twists and turns, and most of the time, you don’t even know when they happen until after the fact. It is an amazing, fast-paced, action-filled book with many things that will keep you guessing right up until the end. Many things happen that don’t make sense at first, but once they are explained, you will love Lehane for his wickedness in crafting the deceptions. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves mystery, action, or people who just want a fast-paced read.

Post 5: How much truth should there be in memoirs?

      In my opinion, in order for a book to be non-fiction, it needs to be close to 90% true. Non-fiction is something that is not made up, so it shouldn't have many made up elements in it. However, say one part of your book seems dull, and needs to more "meat" in it, then an author should be allowed to embellish the story a little, just to make it more interesting and gripping. For instance, in James Frey's novel, A Million Little Pieces, he says he was put in jail for three months, when in real life, he was only in jail for a couple of hours. This would be okay, because the end result of being in jail is the same. By saying three months, it made his life sound more interesting, and more gripping to an audience. But with this said, there should still be lines between fiction and non-fiction. If someone wants to read non-fiction, then they should be able to read something that is real, and not made up. and if someone wants to read something that's fictional, then they should be able to read something that is made up, and no real. "Obliterating the lines between fiction and non-fiction" would not necessarily be the best decision, in my opinion. It would just cause too much controversy over whether or not something is fake or real. But that's all that it is: my opinion. But to me, non-fiction should stay mostly true, and fiction should stay mostly fake.