Not everyone can have everything their own way. Your house, your
car, your family, even your friends. They all have many flaws that you will
come across. Nick from Elephant Run by Roland Smith, is a
teenager with his life ahead of him. But he can't have anything the way he
wants it-- his parents got a divorce when he was very young. He lived with
his mom in England, which I have to say was not a place he really wanted to be.
The worst part of all though, was he rarely ever got to talk to his dad, until
the Japanese started to take over England, so his mom sent him away
to live with his father on an elephant plantation in the middle of the Burmese
jungle. In this book I think that Nick will eventually learn to fit in with the
people on the plantation, I think this is going to happen because he truly
knows the meaning of not being able to have everything your own way.
Nick living in the Burmese jungle was his mother's first worry.
Her second worry was that he was never going to be able to fit in with the
people there. It would have been true in the beginning but as I read more Nick
really did learn that having everything handed to you by your mom is not going
to get you very far in life. He also realized that where he was, that wasn't
going to change. The people he was with, they weren't going to change. The most
important thing though is that how much freedom he had there, was not going to
change. He was practically stranded, almost like a puppet on strings, if the
people there said jump he was to respond with how high. His dad however wasn't
around much while Nick was there but towards the end his dad started to shine around
more. Nick was starting to figure out that the people who lived here, this was
their home, this was their life, and he was just thrown in it. He came to
realize that he was thrown into someone else's life and he couldn't make them
change to fit what he wanted but he had to change to fit in with their
lifestyle.
Nick never had to do anything for himself in England. Of course
being that he was 13 his mother pretty much did it all for him. Once he got to
Burma he made some friends and became a somewhat "real kid." He was
learning how to fit in not as a "normal" kid but as someone who has
lived on this plantation his whole life. By the end of the book if you would
have saw him on the street you would have never realized it was the same
person. Nick was realizing that he didn't need his mother to do everything for
him, and he didn't need his father to always be there. There were some things
that he could do on his own but he didn't know that because he had never tried
it. A lot of teens are like that, if everything is given to you why change
that. I have two cousins who are 25 and 22 who still live at home with their
parents, now I can understand why, their mom gives them money, their dad always
makes sure there's gas in their cars, there is always food in the house, and
all their bills get paid. I believe that anyone would stay at home if that
happened for them. But Nick didn't want that, he wanted to be able to know that
he could do things on his own without that extra help from his parents. Coming
to the realization that he had to make sure he blended in with everyone else
and also that he didn't want the extra help from his parents on some things
helped him to eventually fit in with the people of the plantation.
Since I thought that Nick was going to learn how to fit in with
the people of the plantation, it reminds me of the book I'd Tell You I Love You
But Then I'd Have to Kill You. In this book Cammie Morgan goes to a spy school, she meets a boy
named Josh who she starts to like. Every day her friends make her go into town
by herself were she isn't supposed to go. Just like in Elephant Run were Nick is learning how to fit into a new
culture, Cammie is trying to fit in with normal teenagers because she is not a
normal teenager. Learning how to fit in with normal people took the help of
Macey who was a normal teenager before she started coming to spy school. With
her help Cammie learns how to make it seem like she is just a regular person
just like everybody else.
Even though you cannot get everything the way you want it, or the
way that you want everything to be done. It isn't as hard to learn to fit in
with other people as it seems it should be. Sometimes everyone overlooks what
the true meaning of having friends and family are. Just because you don't like
the way they are doesn't mean they are bad people. Even though Nick and Cammie
learned how to fit in with the people who were very different from them, they
knew that even though they were different it didn't make them bad people in any
way, shape or form.
