Compare And Contrast (mainiac Magee And The Cay)

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Maniac Magee and The Cay Black, white, white, human. You can be white or black, but everyone is human. Everyone should be friends no matter what color you are. The two books I read were Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli and The Cay by Theodore Taylor. They had a few main themes, but two of them really stood out. One of them was prejudice and the other was friendship.

Although both books were based on similar themes, they were they were presented from different points of view. Maniac Magee is about a white boy who ends up living with a black family, in a black area of town. The Cay tells about a prejudice white boy who gets stranded on an island with a black man. In both stories people became more accepting of each other by overcoming their differences.

Years ago, friendships between whites and blacks were nearly non-existent.

Timothy, in The Cay, wanted to become friends with Phillip, but Phillip was disapproving bcause his parents taught him not to trust blacks. It was the total opposite with Amanda Beal and Maniac. They both approved of each other and the friendship worked. Also, in Maniac Magee, beat up Maniac, just because he was white.

Spinelli has a good sense of humor, but Taylor had a more serious form or writing. In Maniac Magee, the baseball was a frog. In The Cay, Taylor wrote about death and destruction. Overall, both authors made their points in different ways.

Both books address prejudice at different times in history. Spinelli wrote about racism in the 1980's. Taylor wrote about it in the 1940's. Racism was a problem then, it still is today. It doesn't matter if authors write about it with humor or seriously, it's a subject that we need to be aware of.