The Fruitcake Special and Other Stories

Sypnosis:

The first story is about Anna who adds some fruitcake to a perfume. She decides to try it and notices a difference in the attitude of her boss, who invites her to dinner. Suddenly she realizes when she uses the perfume, unexpected things happen.

Then the book tells us the story of Molly who became a widow, she takes care of her two children alone. However, one day her children take her to her favorite TV show as a spectator. It features a hypnotist. When he asks for a volunteer, the children suggest Molly, who goes on stage. When she falls under hypnosis, strange things happen.

The third story is called brains in which the main character Gina works in a laboratory. She develops a pill capable of improving human intelligence. Her results are great but surprisingly, her boss decides to withdraw her from the project. Little by little we will discover that the company’s objectives were not pure.

The last story is about Chester a young manager, who gets a book called "The Book of Thoughts". Chester reads it at a coffee shop. He discovers that the book allows him to read the other’s mind. But at some point he realizes it's not good as he thought.

Timeline:

Learning Gains:

In this book there are several things that we can consider learning gains such as new words that we didn't know, also the book has shown me expressions that I had never seen before which is very important in my opinion because sometimes we tend to translate the whole expression word by word by its literal meaning and that can confuse us because some expressions have a different meaning of what we expect.

Something that I also consider remarkable is the fact that the book allows us to be in direct contact with the language and that can help us a lot to get used to it even if we don't know the meaning of some words the book gives us a context and clues that can make us find out their meaning. And last but not least, the book can make us improve our pronunciation if we read it out loud.

Message to the Author:

I think your book is very interesting and entertaining because the stories it tells hook us and keep us in expectation. I know it can become very complicated, so I must congratulate you because the book, despite its name, is not very striking and, in my opinion, easily exceeds the reader's expectations.

I also think that the characterization of the characters is very well done because you don't feel, to a certain extent, that you are talking about fictional stories or anything like that. It may seem that we are listening to an anecdote. If I have to complain about something, it is perhaps that the book has very few images, and I think it would be a good suggestion on my part because I think this would make the book even more endearing.

What does the book means to me?

In this section, I would like to add my thoughts about the book, and I want to start by saying that at first, I thought that the book only told fictional stories that bordered on the cliché, but after some reflection, I realized that the book sometimes deals with the repercussions of certain actions that the characters perform and also sometimes shows us some values that we should take into account, but most of the time I only feel that the book is about the stories themselves, so I think I can say that the author sometimes wants to show us the values of the actions only in a few cases without losing focus of the stories he tells. However, perhaps the reader can assume that some things are due to a certain value or thought of the author, which we should not forget since in the written works, most of the time the author's ideals are expressed since they are in their right if they wish to do so.