Entry 1 (In Darkness)

I am reading the book In Darkness, by Nick Lake. It is hard to identify main characters in this book because most of the book so far are thoughts and stories from inside the main character’s head. There are main characters in each story, but they differ each time. So some of the major characters that repeatedly come up in each story are the young Haitian boy, Shorty, who is telling us the stories, his twin sister Marguerite, a gang leader known as “Biggie”, and Dread Wilme. The setting is also hard because there is the setting of the dark rubble under a hospital where Shorty is trapped as he tells us these stories, and then the setting of most of the stories he tells are in the small, poor town of Cite Seleil. The main overall conflict in my book so far is Shorty is trapped under the rubble of a hospital after an earthquake in Haiti. He is slowly dying of thirst, hunger, and insanity. He needs to get out. Also, there are many side conflicts in the stories he tells, such as fights between the gang members, crimes of other people, and as Shorty and his twin try to survive in the violent country of Haiti.