Emma's Padlet by

key passages:

"But insults were hurled in just the same way as missiles, if you thought about it, and if other people happened to be standing in the line of fire they got. That's what had happened with Nicky and Mark: he had made them visible, he had turned them into targets, and if he was any kind of a friend at all he'd take himself well away from them." (Marcus's point of view)

"This wasn't right. He was only a kid. He'd been thinking that more and more recently, as he got older and older. He didn't know why. Maybe it was because, when he really was only a kid, he wasn't capable of recognizing it -you had to be a certain age before you realized that you were actually quite young. Or maybe when he was little there was nothing to worry about- five or six year ago his mum never spent half the day shivering under a coat watching stupid cartoons, and even if she had he might not have thought it was anything out of the ordinary." (Marcus's point of view)

"Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour, reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops... [...] In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath the same day ? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts." (Will's point of view)

The way the author addresses suicide:

Nick Hornby has a very interesting way of addressing suicide. When I started reading this book, I was very surprised by how funny and sad the story can be at the same time. I know it seems paradoxical and yet the author links these two very different feelings particularly well. The story is separated between two different points of view: Marcus's and Will's. Marcus is twelve years old and lives with a depressed mother who also happens to be broke, while Will is thirty-six, lives on his own and doesn't need to work thanks to his father's wealth. Despite their age difference, Marcus seems mentally older than Will. In chapter ten, Marcus's mother attempts to commit suicide. In most books, the reader would feel particularly sad and maybe uncomfortable because the author would make it really dramatic and try to intensify the bleakness of the act and I am not saying that he should not do so. I think suicide isn't something we should take too lightly and it is important to make people aware of how horrible it is when it happens in someone's life. Yet, it isn't really the kind of sad story this book is about. As a matter of fact, this book is quite humorous. It is not the story itself that I find amusing but rather some details and little misadventures that I am sure wouldn't be necessary to understand the main story but yet completely changes the way the story is read. But since the main story is supposed to talk about suicide (of course I am talking about the first 13 chapters and not the whole book), we could think that it would be quite difficult for the author to tell such a sad story and keep it funny at the same time. And that's why I think Nick Hornby is quite talented, because he does it perfectly and there isn't a moment where we feel like it is too much and inappropriate. OK