by Carina
How do you know if you can trust the stories you’re being fed? I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier is an intriguing, suspenseful, and mysterious story, with unexpected plot twists that will leave you wanting to know more. This story follows multiple thrilling plot lines, providing an abundance of information that helps you find the truth. This book is perfect if you enjoy diving into the endless rabbit hole of mysteries.
I Am the Cheese follows a boy named Adam, who’s going on an ambitious bike ride from Massachusetts to Vermont to visit his father in the hospital. Later we’re introduced to new settings, such as the interviews and flashbacks of an unknown person. All of these perspectives eventually provide enough details for us to piece together the truth about Adam’s life.
Adam’s journey is difficult, with many setbacks and dangerous situations. There are many suspenseful scenes where we wonder how Adam will persevere. Oftentimes Adam’s bike ride gives us insight into his life. He remembers hanging out with friends and spending time with family. During his bike ride, Adam has repetitive behaviors and thoughts, which are interesting to analyze. Why are certain things, such as a song called Farmer in the Dell, and someone named Amy Hertz so significant to him? We see Adam’s adventure through a first-person perspective, which causes us to miss out on some information. We have to figure out the details of Adam’s life ourselves because we’re seeing them as if we already have all the context. This can leave us with more questions unsolved than answered, which is one thing I love about this book. It’s like a constant mind game.
The interviews and flashbacks are also a very important part of this book. Whose perspective are they from? Why are they happening? What do the details mean? How do we interpret them? As the book goes on, you can notice that more of the content is interviews and flashbacks rather than Adam’s bike ride. As the interviews continue we get more and more details to piece together, and you can eventually notice that there are similarities between all of the perspectives we see. That’s one of the reasons why this book is so amazing; it gives us little pieces of foreshadowing that are brought up again and again later, making us think deeper about them. Similarly to during Adam’s journey, we don’t have much background knowledge about the interviews and flashbacks. We have to speculate and form theories about the odd things we’re reading.
Although I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier acts as a fun mystery to solve, it also has some other interesting aspects such as unreliable stories, the author’s interesting writing style, and interesting themes. Some of the important themes that you should note are the corrupt government systems, discovering your identity, isolation, and hidden truths. As Cormier litters Adam's bike ride with intriguing interviews, flashbacks, and twists, he manipulates sentence structure and language to draw you in. Truthfully, this can get confusing at times. There’s so much information to absorb that you can miss things and get thrown off track: seemingly random events leave you disoriented, whilst the plot twists force you to reconsider everything you thought was true.
In a world of lies, how do you find the truth? “I Am the Cheese” by Robert Cormier makes us second guess what we thought was true. This book tells us a thrilling, mysterious, and eerie story, which all starts with a boy riding his bike. All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to enjoy an entrancing mystery that truly makes them think deeply about what the narrative is revealing, and what it is not.
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