One Family... One Jail Cell... One Lesson

     Have you ever read that one book... THAT ONE BOOK, where you want to fall asleep during it? If so, you can relate... if not, you can read this book to say that you have. Touch & Go, written by Lisa Gardner, is one of those books. It draws you in with the synopsis, then gives you a good opportunity to fall asleep. I am just a little bit over half way through. The only reason I want to keep trekking through is because I want to see how the book ends. It has a good plot, but it is not carried out the best way.

    Yawn... Okay, enough about sleep. There is one thing that I have carried away from this book, and that is the theme. Although there can be many themes seen, I like the one about family. One must value their family above all else. This book started off with a thought. How can a perfect family just dissapear? That's the thing, the Denbe family is far from perfect. All of their priorities are not family based. When the Denbe's are abducted, and placed in a jail cell, this is the first time that they have had to work together in a little bit over a year. Mrs. Denbe thought to herself, "No, what silenced me was that he hadn't said anything before now. Sixteen months. A year and a third. I guess that's how long we'd really been drifting apart" (page 208). This quote shows just how disconnected the Denbe family was. Mr. Denbe hadn't been bringing home a pay check for 16 months, and this is the first time that Mrs. Denbe found out.

She goes on to think that, "Not just moments in a marriage, I realized now, but moments in an entire family, when you stopped seeing one another. When you shared a space, but no longer yourselves with one another" (page 231). This is another quote that supports this theme. I strongly agree with the theme that one must value your family above all else. Personally speaking, my family shares everything- daily routines and funny jokes and memories and vacations and our feelings- with one another, which makes our bond stronger. In Touch & Go, the Denbe family's bond is weak, and they don't have much faith in one another. I think of the Denbe family as a broken chain. They have no links connecting them anymore. When they were abducted and put in prison, they started forming a stronger bond and they started sharing their thoughts and feelings with one another. Sometimes it takes extreme measures to find out what is truly important to you. One must value their family above all else.

 

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