Kung Fu Trap Master

Susan Orleans's profile piece on 10 year old Colin was very descriptive. I loved the flow of this piece and the diction of it as well. She kept me enthralled and interested in this little boy throughout nine pages of detail and script about this little boys antics. Orleans's made me feel as if I was looking through a lens into Colin's day to to day life. There were two paragraphs that really stood out to me and really made me laugh at the simplicity and yet how cunning it was.

It's the last page of the reading and the last two paragraphs. Orleans describes Colin as devising a trap, and his inspiration was a boy in his class that had been pestering him. The paragraph begins with the narrator going over to Colin's house one afternoon for a few rounds of Street Fighter and how he started building the trap. She said that he was so absorbed in what he was doing that to me he seemed like a much focused Kung Fu master of traps. She described how he wrapped lace lining around and through the railing of the shed and back to the deck. "He encircled an old jungle gym, something he'd outgrown and abandoned a few years ago, and then crossed over a bush at the back of the yard. Briefly, he contemplated making his dog, Sally, part of the web. Dusk fell. He kept wrapping, paying out fishing line an inch by inch." Susan Orleans's did a fantastic job at capturing how intense this moment was and how focused Colin was. His concentration was unbreakable, his trap was elaborate in how she described how he encircled his old jungle gym and even thought about making his dog apart of his trap. To me that’s astonishing how she brought out his creativity in his elaborate scheme! She made her character truly come alive and seem so sure and knowing, as well as an extremely smart ten year old boy. However, the simplicity of it came out to me at the end when it got dark, she described how you could hardly see the lines of the trap and he tells her “That’s the point.” He told her how you could’ve used thread instead of fighting line but it is invisible and that’s perfect! He was so proud to be the only one who knows about his trap besides her and how it is virtually undetectable at night. “With that, he dropped the spool, and skipped up the stairs of the deck, threw open the screen door and then bounded into the house, leaving me and Sally his dog trapped in his web.” Amazing ending to me! It was well written and well executed. This evil genius of a little boy devised a trap that was so perfect and cunning that he was even able to trap her and his dog in the process! Although he was able to act so slyly with this trap, he still retained his youthful mind frame when he skipped up the stairs and away from them. I thought that was really cute and a really great way to end this piece.