Blog 2

When the team of swimming boys manages to get run off the road on a snowy evening after their first meet, they are forced to wait it out together in the cold. It ends up being a sort of “bonding experience” for the boys, a time where they open up about themselves. At the end of the swim season they have all become a strong group and almost like brothers, which really affects the plot when they band together to fight for what they want. Real-life brother and sister relationships are also very important and I wanted to talk a little about these relationships myself and how important they are.
When I was little and my sister and I would get in an apocalyptic battle over dolls or something ridiculous (beanie babies were sure popular), there was always plenty of drama to go around. After we’d gone off to our separate rooms and thought about what we’d really been fighting about, it was put in better perspective. Then we’d end up bumping into each other somewhere (our mother would put us in a room together to “talk”), and it would seem like nothing ever happened. But it took time to get to that spot. My point is, that when you’re stuck living with and growing up with a person from since you can first remember, you get a little sick of them. Eventually their tiny habits and little quirks start to make you want to scream in their face. How come I never saw that in this book?
These boys were stuck together in even more ‘cramped’ quarters than an average family in a house. They all either had a flaring temper, self-righteousness, a ‘bionic’ leg, or an ability to be completely mute 89% of the time. Wouldn’t you get a little annoyed? The team was forced to practice at their local community center, which was too small to have even a standard competition-size pool. They bump into each other’s heads during practice, and are coached by a staff outcast and a homeless man. (Who happens to live in the very spot they practice. He could be considered a member of the ‘family’, too.) I would also think that after they’d lost nearly the entirety of their swim meets, that their chumminess and moral would go down. They’d start to blame each other for their losses. However, I can excuse Chris from not instigating conflict because he may not really understand what’s going on. I don’t want to be a person who’s thinking ‘conflict!conflict!’ because I really don’t even like when there’s a lot of fighting and swear words flying across the page. I just want it to be realistic. If it’s not set in 2040, the relationships represented should be real.
I also think that in today’s highschool environments, the kids would not accept each other as easily. They might see one another in school and give a cold shoulder because the other kid doesn’t run with their crowd. Doesn’t this happen everyday? Instead, we have the school bully standing up for someone who can’t fight for themselves. It’s been said that bullies hate weakness and I wonder why a bully would feel the need to rescue someone who couldn’t stand up for themselves.
Another relationship that I think wouldn’t have occurred would have been T.J.’s proudness of ‘his’ team. At the end of the book he was fighting for ‘his’ guys to get letter jackets so that he himself could show them all off to the school. His idea was to shove it to the jerks of the school who believed in Cutter High’s prestigious athletic program. T.J. became somewhat of a father to the team it seemed. Why was he a character that was considered more mature than the others? I almost got a feel that he thought he was better off than them, and the races he won were just so they could all get letter jackets in the end. I think that if this were set in a highschool today and portrayed more realistically, T.J.’s attitude would have caused him to become distant from the team, and in turn, his teammates would resent him for it.
All in all, I think that the relationship’s presented in Whale Talk could have been much more realistic.