College Reading Reflection "Madonnas of Echo Park":
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After reading “Madonnas of Echo Park” by Brando Skyhorse, I was assigned to do Reading Response Journals to discuss what the chapter was about, what were the message/characters/settings/discussions about the chapter, and what I liked about it. I started to realize that even though the characters are fiction, the stories are true for an immigrant or gang member who are living now in LA are experiencing in their lives. The character Aurora may have been a young girl like me but the one who touched and inspired me the most was Angie. She was the most interesting character out of all the others because she represents all young teenagers who struggled through friendships and the actions she does in the story, like having a crush and the sister friendship connection with Duchess, are what all of us, include me, had struggled and gone through in our teenager life. This character influenced me in my motivation for attending college because I want to more on to the future to have a better life instead of the mistake past I have done in the past. I would like to leave that all behind and work to the future to help me get in a good career path.
Beyond College One, my reading didn’t really changed throughout the novel but it made me had emotion feelings through each chapter from amazing, curiosity, frustrated, boredom, and shocked. The strategies I have developed for managing doing both the reading and RRJ. I would first reading the chapter for probably 45 minutes or an hour, depending on how long the chapter is, and then I would start writing or taking notes on what were the importance about the chapter. The only difference I find in the reading is that each chapters tell a different story which would sometime be connected to the chapter or not, which confuses my brain after finishing reading it. The chapters would never answer my questions understanding or clearly, like “Did Beatriz die at the bus stop waiting for Mary?” or “Did Felicia ever survived after trying to rescue her boss’s wife who tried to commit suicide?” I would reread the chapters again to figure out the truth, even though it still never answered my questions. I feel like an insider in reading for college when I am reading at home or in the library and doing the importance of getting a good grade in my RRJs like every other student who are also assigned this assignment as well. I feel like an outsider reading in college because I’m reading a higher level book that is meant for college readers instead of high school readings and knowing why the author wrote about this instead of not knowing it. I would mostly be trying to read high level novels, like this story, to improve my reading skills more when I enter the next grade level course in my semester. By reading “Madonnas of Echo Park”, I was inspired and amazed how a single book can actually help me through college and letting me know that this is what the real world is like in someone else’s point of view.