“Forged By Fire” is a book that is realistic as your imagination. It gives you empathy between dialogue and dialogue and holds a great amount of feelings that connects to each and everyone single one of the characters in the book. As you keep reading and understand more of the development you’ll start to see why this book holds so much potential for you to read.

“Forged By Fire” is about Gerald that had a past problem as a kid and a future problem as a teen. Gerald was born from an drug abusing mother who later then left him in their house by himself. Gerald was as curious as a kid and so he started playing around until he found himself a lighter which his mother told to not play with it but his curiosity bypass his mother warning. While playing around with the lighter, he accidently got the curtains caught on fire and he proceeded to go hide somewhere because he was scared of how big it became. When the fire was put down, the house was already in ruined and his mother didn’t came to see him if he was alive and okay but his aunt came and took him in his care. After that incident, Gerald started living with his aunt until the moment his mother came back and was with a small girl that is going to be his sister and a step-father which will later on prove to be his future problem.

When I first started reading this book, I didn’t really care about reading it thoroughly and  as a fantasy loving type of guy that I am, I just thought of it as a boring fiction until I read a few sentence in and that’s when it got me hook into it. Gerald who is a strong character, had a problem and that problem was his step-father. His stepfather is a pedophile and because of that he hated him when he do things to his sister. Gerald tried hard to stop his stepfather from molesting his sister which lead him to the point where he couldn’t hold it in him anymore and so he explained everything to Mr. Washington, a friend’s father who was helping Gerald on his problem called the cops on Gerald’s father and got him arrested for child molesting. After that it became peaceful with him, his sister, and his mother who was getting better over time until his stepfather who was sentenced to jailed for a few years came back. Gerald and his sister still hates him and his mother was still the same around his stepfather until one day when his mother went out to grab some cigarettes, his stepfather started to do the same thing again to his sister which eventually got into a fight and then a fire broke out in the apartments that they were living in causing him to collapse and go unconscious along with his sister. After they were rescued, they were told by the authorities that their stepfather had died in the fire which then made them happy.

The storyline is written out amazingly and the dialogue between each characters shows that these are not just normal characters with feelings and emotions. Sharon D. Draper who is the author of “Forged By Fire” is great professional author. She is a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for books about African-American experience. Sharon D. Draper has been honored at the White House for six times and was one of the only four author in the nation to speak at the Library of Congress National Book festival in Washington D.C. Forged By Fire is by far the best book out of the Hazelwood Trilogy in my opinion.

“Forged By Fire” is such a great book that I HIGHLY recommend to anyone. Ever since I finished it, I wanted to read more that are exactly like “Forged By Fire”. It left me with satisfaction along with me understanding that we’re living in the same world as they do. With its characters that you can empathize with and it’s story that is well-written, I doubt anyone will not read this masterpiece.