d continually made many connections to other texts she had read before. "Anna" has a wonderful sense of humor and contributed a wonderful comic relief to the discussions. We decided to meet during lunch times, which provided a relaxed and fun atmosphere. Each worked so well together and our discussions were both lively and comfortable with little silences, in fact we often found ourselves still talking while the other students returned from lunch.
             When I asked each student to participate in the book group I could see that they were very eager and even felt very special. After I told the girls, they jumped up and down and ran to tell their other friends of their special assignment. I unfortunately had little time to introduce the text to my readers, for I asked them right before their February vacation, and all I could do was hand them the book and ask them to read it over the break. I wanted to make sure they had enough time to read the text without worrying about their other schoolwork suffering because of the extra reading. I also wish we could have read the book in sections so that we could talk about predictions and reactions as we read, but time did not allow for that. I learned the Anna had previously read the book, so I did not worry about this situation I was confident that this arrangement would work out just as well.
             As mentioned, we met during the lunch period, which gave us a good forty minutes for each meeting. Over the semester we met about five times, which gave us time to really examine a lot of the text. This book could take many more meetings than that for it is such a rich novel, but I feel that we accomplished so much in five meetings.
             I could tell that the students were a bit nervous during our first meeting. They did not know me very well back in February, and I believe they had no idea as to what was expected of them. As we sat down to begin our first meeting I took out my tape recorde...