Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Title: Lord of the Flies
Author: William Golding
Published: January 1959 by Capricorn Books

My Rating: 3.5 stars
Tags: Fiction | Classic | Thriller | Survival
Includes: Brief Profanity, Murder, Disturbing Scenes

First Lines: The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

A plane, with a group of schoolboys inside, crashes onto a deserted island. One of the older boys, Ralph, becomes the leader since there are no adults who survived the plane crash. All is going well until one of the boys, Jack, shows up. He's the opposite of Ralph - aggressive, heartless, and a warrior. He is determined on becoming chief of the boys, and instead of making a priority of being rescued, all he cares about is hunting. The blissful freedom of the boys quickly escalates into a frenzied and unorganized chaos. Soon, it even leads to murder...

We read this book for my English class and from what everyone had told me, it was supposedly a horrible book. So I started it with very low expectations. I think the first chapter or two were pretty slow and kind of boring. From what I heard from all of my friends and parents, this was a very dark book. But so far, it was just about a bunch of boys running around naked since there were no adults on the island.

And then Jack came into the story. Wow, even though I didn't really like the author's writing style, he had a knack with character development. Each boy in the book had a different personality, characteristics, and appearance. I could easily visualize what each boy was like. I really liked Ralph and Piggy; they were the protagonists in the book and seemed to be the only ones who remained sane on the island. All of the other boys, led by the cruel Jack, became fierce hunters and murderers...it was scary! William Golding obviously thought long and hard while writing this book. My English class had long, interesting discussions analyzing parts of the book that I surprisingly contributed to! (I rarely add to the book talks during class - mostly because I say things that no one else agrees with). My biggest complaint about the book was the ending. It was abrupt and vague, and I was really disappointed at how the author ended his book.

Even though there were parts of the story that I thought dragged and could be left out, for the most part it read smoothly. Golding has a wide vocabulary, not to mention his detailed/gruesome death scenes, so I recommend the book for older teens and adults or people who are good at reading between the lines. I probably wouldn't have appreciated this book if I hadn't had help analyzing it from my teacher, but I suggest give it a try! I agree with my friends that this was a dark book, but I disagree that it was a bad one. I actually really enjoyed the book. I probably wouldn't read it again, but I'm glad that we had to read this one for school.

Cover Thoughts: Eh, I don't really care for it. I think the character they chose for the cover, Piggy, should be replaced by something else since he's not even the main character.

Book Supplied by: Read in my 10th grade English class.