What Is The Setting Of Milkweed By Jerry Spinelli

Milkweed has a bit of romance, friendship and tragedy all mixed together quite nicely. A quote from BookPage states, “Jerry Spinelli has fashioned a novel of beauty out of the ugliness of the Holocaust.” The story is about a boy in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during the holocaust. Misha, the boy, dreams of one day becoming a Nazi himself, but soon realizes the harsh realities of the world he is living in. Misha meets a Jewish boy named Uri and they live together in an abandoned barbershop together. They live off of what they can steal and help feed other orphans with what they can get. All the Jews are placed in the Ghetto, except for Uri who pretends not to be one. Misha however, despite not being forced to, follows his friend Janina’s family into the Ghetto. When the train comes to get the Jews, he must escape along with the family. …show more content…
This might sound like a dull hook for a book but by making it mysterious how he has it makes the reader suspicious. When the reader is suspicious, they want to read on, so this hook did its job and is effective. Another thing Jerry Spinelli did well in Milkweed, was describing the setting. He used very strong vocabulary to give the reader every detail about the setting. This makes the reader feel as if they have experienced that setting with the characters in the book. One more thing he did very well was organizing the book chronologically. After the chapters it would clearly state what season of the year that chapter is taking place in. This helped a lot because moves through long time periods in a relatively short amount of text. A final writing technique that is used very well in Milkweed is using not so advanced vocabulary when Misha, or other not educated characters are speaking. When these characters are speaking, Jerry Spinelli uses basic vocabulary because realistically, that is what those characters would know to