The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

This is a wonderful book that challenges the normalities and morals of life, about what is right and what is wrong. It really is a book to make you think, but shows you the complications and problems in life that we could all face. Of course, as you can guess by the title, the book is about a slap, but its about the matter of slapping a child that is not yours. Is it even right to slap a child, let alone a child that is not your own. I suppose many of us today would say its not, but then others would say that as young children they were given the cane and such. I always remember being given a gentle tap if I had done something wrong, very rarely was I smacked. But I enjoyed the way the book made me think, because sometimes we can let our children have there own way, and because of this they have a lack of discipline in there life and think that they can get away with murder. It was a book that had to be thought about, that you had to actually read into because it touched on more topics than that. It touched on abuse, domestic violence, adultry and sexuality. I suppose for me this made the book more real in the sense that it shows how things do happen behind doors that we are not aware of, how they can cause us to look at the world differently.

In my opinion it is wrong to slap a child, regardless of the fact that they may or may not be your child. Discipline can be done in many other ways that are safer and are probably better in getting the point across. But to me all a slap does is promote violence, in that if someone does something wrong its ok to harm them, its ok to put them in there place. Yet the fact that the author laid out the different arguments did seem to make you stop and pause, because we are all brought up in different ways which means our ethics and morals on discipline methods are different. However, I felt that in someways the book seemed to be more or less about the individual characters life styles, that it did not really focus all that much on the issue of slapping a child.

However I did find it to be a very interesting book because of the journey it took me. It really seemed to open my eyes to the outside world that is perhaps hidden behind closed blinds and such. In some places it did seem to be a little slow and a little boring, but in others it caught my attention a lot more. Im not really sure what else to say on the book because of how much it contains, and all the different situations and issues that it talks about. but its a recommended read if you want something morally challenging.