The Last Song

  

            The book I chose for my choice book report is The Last Song.  The main character in this book is Ronnie Miller.  She is a17 year old teenage girl who just graduated from high school.  At the beginning of the book Ronnie liked to wear dark clothes and dark makeup. Ronnie has beautiful brown hair and had a streak of purple hair that she colored.  Some people thought she was kind of scary because of how she dressed.  At the beginning of the book she seemed to get into a lot of trouble because she would come home late at night from hanging out with her friends and she wouldn't listen to her mom and that would make her mom furious by the time Ronnie got home.  Ronnie was a little bit selfish too because if her parents wanted her to do something she didn't like she would cause more trouble and try to get out of it.  She tried to do that when her mom wanted her to visit her dad for the summer, but it didn't work this time.  Another time she didn't want to go to church so she locked herself in her room and her mom would yell at her until they had to go and then they left without her.  She started to change when she went to visit her dad for the summer.  She started being more forgiving because she finally forgave her dad for leaving after her mom and dad got a divorce.  She forgave him after he forgave her for not talking to him for three years.  She was more kind to her dad and her brother after that and she started being with them more often.  At the beginning of the book she wasn't confident at all.  Ronnie is a lot different than most characters because at the beginning of the book she was trying to be somebody she wasn't.  She really  wasn't someone that would get in trouble a lot, she was just really angry at her mom and dad.  She really didn't know what she wanted to do now that she graduated from high school.  When she went to visit her dad she started being herself again.  She even started playing the piano and talking to her dad all the time.  At the end of the book she found who she really was.  She was kind, forgiving, responsible, and unselfish and she decided that she would audition to go to Juilliard. 

           

            I think that the author picked Ronnie's point of view because she experienced the most in the story.  Her life changed dramatically with her parents' divorce and when her dad died.  There wouldn't be as much of a story with the other characters.  If the author would have picked Ronnie's dad as the point of view nobody would have known how someone felt after he died.  If the author pick Ronnie's brother there wouldn't be much to the story because he was so young he didn't really understand what was going on when his dad was dying and his parents were going through the divorce.  So the author picked Ronnie because she was at a time of her life when not only was there a lot of change because of the divorce and the death of her father, but she was growing from a teenager to an adult.  The author was able to get into Ronnie's mind and let us know how she felt when she got arrested and when her dad died or when she met Will.    I think that the saddest part of the book was when Ronnie heard that her dad had cancer and he was going to die in less than a year.  Ronnie and her dad started to cry and then her dad had to tell Ronnie's little brother and because he didn't think that he was actually going to die he started crying.  Ronnie thought about the three years that she lost with her dad because she had shut him out of her life.  She felt that she didn't know her dad that well and she knew she didn't have much time to spend with him and make up for the time that they lost together. So she decided not to go back to New York with mom and brother after the summer ended and to spend more time getting to know her father, even though she would miss the rest of her family and her friends.  She spent months helping him with everything like taking him places and making him food, but he could do very much because he was getting weaker every day.  The day her dad died Ronnie had fallen asleep on the floor next to him and she woke  up and saw that he was dead.  When her dad died Ronnie was extremely upset because she didn't talk to him for three years and she felt like she needed to get to know her dad better, but then it was too late and he was gone.