Hurricane Song blog post

                 My class recently finished the inspiring book, Hurricane Song by Paul Volponi. The book is about a boy living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The boy's name is Miles, and he recently moved to Louisiana to live with his father, a jazz musician. Miles was not interested in Jazz, and believed that his father loved his instruments more than him. When the hurricane hits Miles, his father and a few of his father's very good friends and fellow jazz musicians are forced into The Superdome, a football stadium, with many other people of low income. They are forced into awful conditions for a couple days, but by the way the book is written, it makes the reader feel like it was  a couple months.
Miles and his father were able to live through deaths, injury, sickness, and so much violence. I believe Miles and his dad were able to live through that because of the music; even though Miles resented it at first.


               At the beginning of hurricane song, Miles asked for football gear for his birthday, something he really wanted and specifically asked for.  Instead he got a drum. In the superdome, he played the that drum, and used it more than any football gear would have. When someone died they played. When gangs were setting fires they played. They brought peoples' hopes up when they were tired and defeated, hungry, thirsty and fatigued. When a man named Cyrus commited suicide they played- together, always together, with Pop (Mile's father) on his horn and Miles on the drum. When Miles and Pop escaped the dome and swam through the floods to Pop's old jazz club, they played. I believe that all of the music kept them going, surviving. I think that if they didn't have that hope, they wouldn't have escaped the dome, and they would have endured much more torture. I'm not saying if you play jazz BOOM your life will get better, but in this scenario, they wouldn't have lived without it.



              All in all, this concludes that Miles and Pop in Hurricane Song survived the storm through music, and hope, all while giving people hope around them, when they had none.