A Seperate Piece

A Seperate Piece by John Knowles is about boys living in New Hampshire that go to a private all boys school during World War 2. Phineas is a very athletic person that is very competitive. Gene is more of a conserved person that is more about school than sports. Although they are opposites, they just so happen to be bestfriends. Phineas is the one that makes all of the rules and Gene is willing to do anything that Phineas tells him to. One day they come up with the idea to jump out of a tree and into a river. While up in the branches, Phineas falls and breaks his leg. Since there is a war going on and everyone is getting closer to getting drafted they decide to enlist. Gene was going to enlist until the morning that Phineas came back. The story is about Gene and Phineas and the War that was going on at the time and they way that everyone deals with it.

I thought that this was a good book. It really showed the way that some people were feeling durning the war and the way that it affected the teenagers. I liked it because it was about the different ways that different people dealt with the problems that were handed to them.

I would recomend this book to general tenth grade classes. It had a good amount of large words in it and I think that they could benefit from reading a challenging book. It was a book that was written with a lot of different emotions and you could tell what he wanted you to feel.