By Beatrice Raushill SPS06
When I was thirteen years old I read two books which were the first books that I thought were good. The books are connected to eachother and together they made a big impact on me. The books are called Klassresan and Malin + Rasmus = Sant by Moni Brännström Nilsson. I think the names of the books are rather silly but the stories are very good and they probably affected me so much because I was so young and had not yet read so many serious books.
It is a story about love and problems as a teenager and it ends tragically, so the genre will probably be a tragedy. I have never read those books again so the only memories I have is from the first time. Anyway the first book Klassresan is about a class that soon will quit sixth class and get separated and start at a new school. That was exactly what I had just done and that was why I got interested in that book. The class is going on a last trip together and it is a girl in the class and her life that the book is partly about. The author writes partly from the girls perspective (from her diary) and partly from the classmates’ perspectives. This girl gets along with a boy that is new in the class. He is two years older and does not care about school so much. He is a real bad boy who smokes, drinks and even inhales drugs. Because of that he is a pupil who has not moved up and is now going in her class.
It was really easy to understand the book because the writer describes everything very well. She writes a lot about the characters’ lives in detail so you get to know everything about them. At the same time as I read the book I listened to the radio as I usually do when I read. There were particularly two songs that I remember well, so when I hear them today I think of the acting in the book. I had already experienced something like Klassresan myself and that made it more interesting to read the second book, Malin + Rasmus = Sant, which could be something I was going to experience. The people had changed and were still changing as they started a new school and got new friends. The girl and the boy (Malin and Rasmus) fall in love with each other of course, but they are very different, and some bad things happen in their relationship, such as Rasmus starts to inhale drugs again after a while even though he promised Malin to quit. It was interesting to read about how the classmates changed and I thought that is how real life is. That will happen to me and my friends and other classmates too. I understood how this girl felt in the different situations, all her insecurity and the problems you have as a teenager. It felt good to read about something that was a little like myself at that time.
I also liked the story because it was so cute with all the love, and the love was such a big difference to all other things Rasmus was doing. The love made him change and he stopped doing bad things and spent more time studying. It did not affect my values and tastes so much as I recall it, but just because I was quite young I thought “So this is what life is going to be like?” “Will something like this happen to me too?”. The book changed my idea of life a bit. It was such a great book and a very sad ending, which made the book even better, and it probably affected my heart a little too. I don’t feel like I am burned out on it because I have just read it once. The only thing would be that I think the titles of the books are a little bit childish. I do not feel like an artist, and even if I did, it would not be because of this book. It has not given me any inspiration to be any kind of artist, it was just enjoyable reading.
