In the book, The First Part Last, Angela Johnson describes mostly in the book “Coming of age.” She uses many symbols that represent coming of age, and how Bobby went from being a child to a semi-man. He has matured majorly, but he is just not fully there yet with becoming a full man. Bobby overcomes constant obstacles while trying to conquer coming of age. He gives up playing basketball all the time, spending all day at the arcade with his friends, and being able to have fun, and live his life the way he wants to live it. Becoming a man Bobby is forced with constant obstacles, but he knows and is ready to face the reality with them.…
In the memoir The Glass Castle, the Walls family faces many discriminations from the outside world due to their life in poverty. The one who is most impacted by this is Jeanette. During this time, Jeanette is in the fifth grade, and is being treated differently from the other kids due to her life in poverty. After lunch time, the grade goes outside, and this is the perfect opportunity for kids to pick on others. Jeanette is targeted by a group of girls who don’t see eye to eye. After they completely surrounded Jeanette, after a disagreement and the first punch thrown, the girl had seen that Jeanette had no buttons on her coat. After the girl said, “This girl ain’t got no buttons on her coat!”(p.139), she felt obligated to persist in the one-sided…
Have you ever found yourself doing something not just what you believe in but because you feel that if you didn’t it could be a life or death situation? Elisa Lindheim has found herself fighting for people she loves and the underground. She will risk everything and put everyone she loves in danger to extinguish Hitler’s madness. Elisa Lindheim is the main character in Vienna Prelude by Bodie and Brock Thoene, an exciting and courageous historical fiction book. I believe that courage is not just knowledge but it is also will, as long as you're doing it for what you believe in.…
Only after Ying-ying realizes that she has passed on her passivity and fatalism to her daughter Lena does she take any initiative to change. Seeing her daughter in an unhappy marriage, she urges her to take control. She tells Lena her story for the first time, hoping that she might learn from her mother’s own failure to take initiative and instead come to express her thoughts and feelings. Lena, too, was born in the year of the Tiger, and Ying-ying hopes that her daughter can live up to their common horoscope in a way that she herself failed to do. Moreover, in this belief in astrology Ying-ying finds a sort of positive counterpart to her earlier, debilitating superstitions and fatalism, for it is a belief not in the inevitability of external events but in the power of an internal quality.…
It was evident that Anne Frank was a young girl who was in hiding due to war and hoping to make it out.…
In this autobiography of Anne Moody a.k.a. Essie Mae as she is often called in the book, is the struggles for rights that poor black Americans had in Mississippi. Things in her life lead her to be such an activist in the fight for black equality during this time. She had to go through a lot of adversity growing up like being beat, house being burned down, moving to different school, and being abuse by her mom's boyfriend. One incident that would make Anne Moody curious about racism in the south was the incident in the Movie Theater with the first white friends she had made. The other was the death of Emmett Tillman and other racial incidents that would involve harsh and deadly circumstances. These this would make Miss Moody realize that this should not be tolerated in a free world.…
While reading the novel, 'My Antonia', one can very quickly notice that author, Willa Cather has much admiration for the character, Antonia. Throughout 'My Antonia', readers can conclude that Antonia is a very optimistic and inteligent girl who grows into an independent young woman. Due to such characteristics, many people could very easily find themselves admiring Antonia.…
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne establishes the character Pearl as having tenacity and peculiarity in her personality and traits. First, Nathaniel Hawthorne exaggerates Pearl’s qualities to establish her as an odd child and a separate person from the Puritan town she lives in. In chapter 7, after the governor asks Pearl who created her, she answers by saying ‘no one created her rather her mother plucked her from a wild rose bush near the prison.’ Hawthorne follows Pearl’s remark with, “This fantasy was probably suggest by the near proximity of the Governor’s red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window; together with her recollection of the prison rose bush, which she had passed in coming hither.” (Pg. 77) Adults are not…
Success can only be accomplished with practice, without practice nothing is accomplished. In the end there is either winning or losing, your preparation will determine the outcome. Princess Alyss Heart lives in Wonderland, but her evil aunt, Queen Redd, has made it very hard for anyone to live there. Her mother, Queen Genevieve, Redd’s sister, has loved Redd deep on the inside, but has not wanted to put her daughter at risk. So there was a separation between imaginations, there was good and bad. Redd had ruled Black Imagination, the bad of course, and Queen Genevieve ruled White Imagination, the good. What will happen if Alyss meets Redd?…
The Diary of Anne Frank shows many stereotypes, such as Jews, adults, parents, and teenagers. Stereotypes are a standardized mental picture or belief held in common by members of a group. The Diary of Anne Frank identifies that the stereotype of a teenafer is moody, argumentative, and self-absorbed. The three teenagers, Anne, Margot, and Peter commonly show these traits in the play, The Diary of Anne Frank.…
Susanna Kaysen, in her memoir Girl, Interrupted, recounts her eighteen-month stay at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. The events in the book took place in the 1960’s, meaning outside the hospital’s reinforced walls, the world was bustling with racism, social activism, and the Vietnam War. The story is not told as a chronological series of events, but rather as a collection of memories, darting between various periods of Kaysen’s visit. Throughout her stay at the hospital, Kaysen met a variety of women who influenced her life profoundly, including a self-proclaimed sociopath, a girl with a face disfigured by burns, and a meth addict. In Girl, Interrupted, author Susannah Kaysen achieves her purpose of elaborating on the dangers of confusing unconventionality with insanity, through characterization, impressionism, symbolism, and her…
In this section of Let Me Hear Your Voice it becomes pretty evident that Anne-Marie is cured. Her development is nothing short of miraculous. The effectiveness of Anne-Marie’s behavioral intervention is occurring at a time when such an intervention was still considered by some as “morally reprehensible” (pg. 149) with the general consensus being that “Autistic children do not recover”. Yet here, after an eight-month period, Anne-Marie is able to empirically demonstrate with the Vineland test that she is functioning within normal developmental ranges for her age group with a 90% confidence interval.…
As autumn to spring, as night to day, as black to white, all things change. Change is perpetual, eternal, inevitable, and constant. “Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become,” anonymous. The Newberry Award novel, “The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle” written by Avi, truly depicts great change. Set in a ship sailing vast seas and oceans of the 1800’s, the characters face troubles and hardships that lead them to the journey of change and transformation in their lives. The most characters that depict great change are Charlotte, our protagonist, Captain Jaggery, our antagonist, and former Second mate, Keetch. Through this tumultuous voyage, Charlotte metamorphoses into a lady of great beauty, Captain Jaggery deteriorates, and Keetch’s duplicitous nature arises.…
I believe that Kathleen Norris is correct when she says that "in many ways the world of My Ántonia is still with us, a neglected but significant part of America,” because we still have people coming into our country hoping to fulfill the American dream and having the country fall short of their expectations.…
In order to classify a story as a fairy tale, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the story must be a tale containing actual fairies, an imaginable artificial story, or an absolute dishonest story. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are not novels about fairies or are completely false stories, but they do contain imaginable artificial plots in which a young girl named Alice travels to different worlds in her dreams. Through the creative adventure of these dream stories, one could vaguely qualify them as a fairy tale. Tolkien's perspective opposes the label of fairy tales to Alice stories by which he states that dream stories may be a fantasy of the mind, but lose their realization when Alice wakes up back in the real…