Possibility Of Joy Book Report

The book that Alexis and I wrote is entitled Possibility of Joy, and it is a story about the beginnings of mental health issues in younger children. The main focus of the book is not depression per se, although the term could be applied, but rather the the tendency for the younger generation to resist opening up about their feelings, which leads to greater mental health problems. Our primary goal for our book was to help prevent younger children from suppressing their feelings so that this habit won’t contribute to depression in their teen years. One word in the story that holds particular importance is the word sad. Sad is a word that any child can connect to and relate to. It’s not a complex word, like some of its synonyms, and it conveys the message we were trying to get across on that page. As it was previously stated in the first paragraph, the aim of the book was not to convey depression in particular because only about 2 percent of young children actually have clinical depression, which is more than just sadness. However, on the page where …show more content…
On this page the word is used in two back to back sentences to emphasize its importance. Overcoming struggles is a large part of this book, and using the word overcome, rather than something like conquer or get over was very purposeful. Those words had been considered but, to me didn’t have the feeling that I was going for. Conquer holds a negative connotation because it is used often to make reference to winning a war or battle, and I wanted a more uplifting feel for the ending. ‘Get over’ was a phrase I was avoiding like the plague because the last thing to say when helping a child to open up about and prevail over their issues is ‘get over it,’ and whenever I read over that passage with ‘get over’ in the sentence that’s all I would hear. Overcome, on the other hand, has more of an elevating or inspiring tone to it, which is what I was aiming to