Solutions

Author’s Note: This essay shows that there are solutions to everything. Your friends and family will do anything to help you through these problems in life. There are also simple problems in life that can easily be fixed.

Everybody has had their bugs in life. From forgetting their homework to losing their job. But people don’t think of how animals feel when they have problems like this. Louis, a swan that was born without a voice, has to communicate without sound. If he is in trouble, he can’t cry out for help. He won’t ever be able to find love because he can’t tell her how he feels. How would you feel if you couldn’t tell anyone anything no matter how hard you tried? These problems all have solutions to them, too.

Louis knew a young boy that still went to school. He took him to school with him so he could learn to read and write. Communication with humans is easy after that, but when he gets back to his family, Louis tries to write hello to them on a slate with chalk, but none of them understands the words scribbled on the slate. So Louis had to find some way to communicate with them. His father had seen trumpets that sounded like the swans, to he went to get one. When Louis learned how to play it, he was able to express his feelings to other swans, even though it wouldn’t be a whole conversation.

In all of this commotion of life, Louis is in love with a beautiful swan named Serena. Louis finds out that with all of the practice with his trumpet, he can play for her and she will realize what a wonderful strong swan he is. This is a way of communication through music. E.B White does a great job of describing how music can be expressed in different emotions like love, happiness, sadness, joy, depression, hopelessness, anger, and many others. Serena realizes what she had been ignoring: A wonderful strong, brave, and talented young male swan. So finding love by playing a trumpet wasn’t hard after all; it just took time.

Towards the beginning of the book, a swan couple, Louis’s parents, make a nest and get ready to have eggs, a fox comes and tries to eat the mother. But the boy, Sam, comes and throws a stick at the fox so it would go away and leave the family alone. Sam had been watching the swan family so far, and as the eggs hatched and the babies grew up, Sam sat on a log on the edge of the pond. The boy was so interested in the birds, that he protected them so they could have a family of little birds, too. When you get to know someone or something, you feel the need to be nice and protect them. Like giving them a ride, or saving their life. Either way, it is an instinct that humans have. To protect one another. Eventually Sam and Louis grew up and Sam took him to school and camp while visiting each other often.

Books can have the effect on you where you feel like that book was written for you, or that it seemed like you could make a lot of self-connections, or that you felt that one of the characters was like you in some sort of way. E.B White did a fantastic job of connecting these kinds of things in the book, so that audiences of all kinds would feel that way. Over all, the author did a great job of composing this book and giving the message that everyone is important, and should not be ignored.