Wattpad Contest Entries

How a story can influence the now and then

(This is my entry for Weekly Wattpad Contest #48)

       Presently, people do not care about how the world works back then. They only think about how to be in the world now and there’s nothing wrong about that. As they say, you should always think about the present and the future instead of dwelling in the past.

      A book or a movie that talks about the past but inspires people in the present earns to be considered as our key to the future of the world because it can open endless possibilities by just taking the time to read what once was. This particular book/series embodies the essence of how different people could always stand on what they believe in no matter how different each individual thinks.

       The ‘Storm and Silence’ book/series by Rob Thier caught my attention in 2013 where I was still in middle school. Nobody was interested to read books filled with history except me. I liked reading all about the facts that surround anything or how a country or person came to be. Most of all, I love uncovering truths that had been hidden away by time and tell all these stories that happened in real life.

       The author created a story based on facts and used his imagination to make the past seemed alive, interesting and reader-friendly by setting the entire mood of the story humorous that keeps the readers desperate for more. Humorous in a way that you can never expect what will happen and what the characters will say and how the jokes seemed hilarious in those times and how it can still be funny today.

       The main characters in the story also have their own unique characteristics and personalities that can be accurately appropriate for the time setting, the Victorian Era, and could also be seen in modern times. The Protagonist, Lillian Linton is a Victorian woman that does not approve of how the English Society sets boundaries of how a female should act and be. All throughout the story she fights for the rights of women and prove that women can also do what society can think only men can do and decided that she should not be dependent on chauvinistic men and work for herself.

       Although she landed on a job, her employer, the chauvinistic and stone cold business tycoon Mr. Rikkard Ambrose, sticks to make her work life hard and challenging, especially when she could only work for him as her counterpart, Mr. Victor Linton and be someone she’s not, a man.

       Dressed as a working class man of their generation, she works to earn her keep and position in society by proving her worth to the most difficult of men, Mr. Ambrose, and accompanies him as his secretary to places and situation no woman could ever imagine/experience in that time setting and how she is having a hard time sticking to her beliefs when she is gradually falling for a man entirely against her beliefs.

       What I think is special and unique about this book/series is that it encompasses an entire new horizon for books of the historical fiction genre just by being an interactive piece of genius. How? Through the chapters you can’t help but learn something you never knew you could and it unconsciously makes you think of how the things you learn could be applied in the present and could help the readers by making them understand how the matters of past could benefit and recreate the society now.

       Lillian Linton’s advocacy of feminism is an example of how you believe in the things you do can affect the worldly ways. If she didn’t think and act the way she did, women all across the globe might still be suppressed and men might still have thought the way they did before. Although, not everyone thinks like Lillian, everything happens at the right moment, slowly,  and if not everyone thinks like she does right now, what could happen if we just give it a few more years and a few more voices that influences equality among the people. And if by any chance she did not think about taking the matters at hand and picking up her Uncle Bufford’s trousers, where could the women be in history right now?