A Place To Belong Essay, Research Paper

The book I choose to read was A Place to Belong by Joan Lowery Nixon. It is book number four of The Orphan Train Quartet. It takes place in the year 1856, in St. Joseph, Missouri. It is during the tine right before the Civil War broke out. Danny Kelly, age 10, is the main character in the book. He was tall and strong for his age. He was always careful and cautious with everything he said or did. He was great at making well thought out plans to get what he wanted. He came to St. Joseph with his five brothers and sisters to be adopted because his father had died and his mother couldn t take care of them. Danny and his sister Peg, age 7, were adopted by Alfrid and Olga Swenson who were very nice. Danny missed his older brother Mike, who he looked up to but he knew he had to be strong and brave for Peg. Danny was always thinking and planning for a way to get his family back together.

1. This story was center around the fight for slavery and the people who were against it. Danny was happy to find out that his new foster parents were against slavery. They were abolitionist. His real father had told him how wrong slavery was. In a hotel, Danny over heard a heated argument between two men. He learned from Alfrid that the one man s name was John Wilkes Booth. There was another time that the Swenson farm that Danny lived on was attacked by three men who were antiabolitionist.

2. Yes, this book has helped support what I ve learned about the Civil War. John Wilkes Booth name was in this story and he was the man who killed Abraham Lincoln after the war was won. John Wilkes Booth was an antiabolitionist. The book also talked about how much people were at odds with on another and what a scary time it must have been to live in.

3. My honest opinion of historical fiction is good. I think that it is good to read them because you can imagine what it was like for people who lived in those historical times. It puts you in their real life situations and you can take the historical facts that you have learned from school and see what it was like to have lived during those times.

4. Danny and his family went through a lot. They lost their father and barely had enough food to eat so their mother gave them up for adoption. They were sent to a strange place and then separated. Through all of that and being so scared, Danny had a lot of courage and determination. He never gave up and made the best of what he had. People going through tough times could read this book and look at the way Danny dealt with things. It could show them to never give up and always make a plan.

5. I think that Alfrid Swenson is the one character who reflect the author s feeling about slavery. He was a good man who always said or tried to do the right thing and he put other people first before himself. He told Danny a quote that said The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. If know one had done anything about slavery then who knows it might have still been around today.

6. Danny and Peg came to live with Mr. & Mrs. Swenson. They missed their old family but they came to love their new family. Then Olga Swenson died and it was just like losing their mother all over again. Danny soon thought of a plan to bring their mother from New York City to marry Alfrid and all of his family would be together again. Even though his plan didn t work out the way he had hoped, he considered him self lucky to have so many people that loved him.

I would pick Danny as my favorite character because he has courage and he is smart. I feel bad that he had to go through so much at his age. I enjoyed the book because I like reading about things that happened along time ago. I picked this book because we had to read the first book in The Orphan Train series for English and I like it. If I could change a part of the story I would make it so Danny s mother and Alfrid would fall in love and get