Extra Credit Final Update: Ending Summary + Characters + Theme + Text-to-self & text

Extra Credit Final Update: Ending Summary + Characters + Theme + Text-to-self & text

I have now finished the book and to be honest, it was actually one of the best books I have read recently. After Abby and Sadeed discover the cultural changes and feelings of America and Afghanistan, they write to each other one more time telling this. Now, they both realize that an overseas connection was developed between them. After Abby receives the fourth letter, she successfully gives her oral presentation for the extra credit project. Then it is revealed that she is not going to be held back after all based on her improved grades now. The story ends with Abby reading Sadeed's last letter during the last day of school, Field Day. Then Abby goes back home on the bus, a changed girl while thinking about Sadeed and Amira. Sadeed also tells in his final letter that he won't forget Abby either.

Complex characters like Abby and Sadeed develop over the course of a text. Before this story even began, both characters were completely different and never even knew each other. Abby was one of those failing students in the sixth grade and Sadeed was just a young boy going to a village school in Afghanistan with his sister Amira. When Abby starts sending the first letter and the other three letters follow later, the two receive letters from one another realizing that they have a lot of everyday life differences to tell each other about.

As this pattern goes for a short time, they interact with each other more and they advance the plot and theme. The plot is advanced more when the two realize that there are other people in their nation who don't like the other country that the writer is sending the letter to. And so it is confirmed that the letters must end, but Abby and Sadeed might find another way to communicate with each other, based on an earlier prediction that I had made and posted in an earlier post. 

On the other side, the theme is overseas friendship and this is developed when the two start writing letters back and forth and start learning about each other's culture and everyday life. And by the time the letters stop being sent because of the cultural differences, the overseas friendship has developed so strong that the two kids can't forget and stop thinking about one another by the end of the story.

A text-to-self connection I have is that in this book's case, Abby and Sadeed are developing an overseas friendship as they send letters back and forth. In my case, I went to India this summer and while I was staying there, I met this one girl also in the 8th grade named Priyanka Shankar. And so we became friends but I didn't tell her that I was from the United States until the final days of my trip. Priyanka said she didn't want to leave me so we started talking on Google Plus, and that's how my overseas friendship developed.




A text-to-text connection is that here is a website article that is closely related to the cultural differences of America and Afghanistan. It mainly talks about the life of Afghanistan and from what it says, I can decipher what major differences there are in Afghanistan compared to the United States. It can be reached via the following hyperlink.

http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/docs/10-64/ch_4.asp