Summary & Theme: The book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is about an incoming freshman named Melinda Sordino. She’s riding the bus to school but she doesn’t have any friends to sit with. While she’s looking over the crowd of kids on the bus she spots her ex best friend, Rachel, but even she mouths “I hate you.” After Melinda attends her first few classes she already hates high school. When she gets to Art class she is assigned a subject that she must turn into art for the rest of the year. Melinda receives the word “Tree” and doesn’t understand how to make that creative. She asked to switch but her teacher wouldn’t let her. Later on, she meets a girl named Heather in one of her classes, although they are completely different people, they start to hang out. Heather really wants to become popular and would like Melinda to help her. She couldn’t care less about popularity but continues to nod and agree with Heather. A couple weeks later, she discovers an old janitor closet that no one uses; she decides to make this her hideaway. She decorates it to her liking and sits in it when she needs some space. Due to Heather’s plot for popularity, Melinda finds herself caught up in helping her impress “The Marthas”, a clique Heather wants to become a part of. Soon enough, Heather tells Melinda that they can’t be friends anymore because they are too different and that she is really weird and depressed. For the first time, she actually wants to be friends with Heather; for Heather is the closest she has to a friend. Melinda starts to skip school more and more and her grades slip. Her parents are angry and disappointed, so they have a meeting with the principal. They try to get her to speak up about why she is acting out but she just stays silent. Her punishment is in school suspension; Andy Evans is there with her. All the memories from an incident in summer…
In these lines, we get the first glimpse of where the setting is. The readers get a chance to see the descriptive environment of Italy with the “pleasant garden”. We are also introduced to Lucentio and Tranio in this part of the play where they are visiting this part of Italy because they had that desire to go there.…
“I bet there were a lot of people mad at Shakespeare, too, but aren 't we all glad that he wrote Hamlet?" Yolanda 's sisters said in trying to make their tight situation with their little sister Yolanda just a little bit lighter. Even during the days the Garcia family had resided in the Dominican Republic, and Yolanda had always had a cause to tell her stories in either fact or fiction form. The family had to be cautious in the dictatorship, which in turn, had caused many sleepless nights in the Garcia household. When the family had immigrated to the United States her mother still had to worry about the stories that Yolanda would go on to write. Would she have to wait around for a social worker to stop by the house if Yo were telling her fiction stories at school? Yolanda had to write her stories about the…
Angella Johnson is the author of the book The First Part Last. This book is about a boy named Bobby growing up in the urban area of New York. Bobby turns 16 and he's going to skip school and hang out with his friends. They go eat at Mineos where Bobby’s dad Fred works. Then they go climb to the top of the Empire State Building. Looking down at the observation deck they see that people look like little tiny ants and they have a great view of the city. Afterwards Bobby comes home for a great surprise when he sees his girlfriend Nia standing in front of Bobby’s house. Nia is holding a red balloon looking at him with a worried look “I’ll never forget that look and how and how her voice shook when she said “ Bobby Iv’e got…
2. What do stalking the old man and the post-murder details reveal about the narrator’s character?…
(R) Antonio’s thoughts reflect the responsibility which he feels to live up to his mother’s expectations, even amidst the struggles of a desensitizing experience as he witnesses Lupito’s death. He displays a high level of maturity and experience as he thinks not just of the horror of the event, but also of the consequences and repercussions of this death.…
Thinking and Reacting “My present world was always, in its mildness, a little disappointing.” Location and the people around you take some time getting used to when you’re in a boarding school. In this novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep, After being stuck in a midwestern town most of Lee Fiora’s life, she decides her eighth grade year that she wants to go to boarding school due to what she has seen on TV and in magazines. Lee has made a huge decision regarding her education; not only that, but where she will live for the next four years of her life and the kinds of people she will meet. Characters and setting have a large impact on the way people think about their life and react to their life.…
Two kinds is a fictional story written by the Chinese-American author Amy Tan. She was born in Oakland California. In this story, the writer explains the conflict and the problem of the mother-daughter relationships and also reveals about American life and the American dream. In this story, Nikon is shown as the main protagonist and the whole story is all about the writers feeling towards event during her childhood. The author also tries to explain the mother-daughter relationship and reveals the generational gap in between the mother and daughter. The author also illustrates the feeling of the children when their parents try to force them to be obedient rather than following their path. According to writer's mother everybody can…
The first literary element in Since You’ve Been Gone is irony. In this book Emily, the main character, is left behind all summer without knowing where her best friend, Sloan, went. The only thing she has is a list of 13 tasks Sloan left that are extremely out of Emily’s comfort zone. Throughout her attempt to complete the list, Emily meets a guy named Frank and they become friends. One night they show up to Emily’s house to find her parents, two playwrights, in need of two actors to play parts in a production they have to put on later that night. Frank gladly agrees to be a part to help out her parents, but they still were missing one character. Completely out of character, Emily chimes in and says, “ I’ll do it” (Matson 216). The fact that…
In her autobiography I Came a Stranger Hilda Polacheck reveals the conflicting role of women in the late 19th / early 20th century as workers, caregivers, and social activists in a conflicting age of progress, hardship and missed expectations. Coming from a very traditional Jewish family in Poland it seems that Hilda Polacheck was destined to be a full time mother and wife never having immersed herself in the American society where women were becoming more and more relevant. The death of her father changes all of this forcing herself her mother and her siblings to fight for survival. This fight is what not only transformed Hilda Polacheck into the woman we remember her as today, but into an American as well.…
Melinda is a freshman in high school, with no friends. The past summer, she called the cops on a party. At least that's what everyone heard. The book is called Speak. She goes through a lot inside the book.…
Emptiness is the feeling you get at 2 A.M when you look at your old Facebook photos, smiling at the old photos of yourself, and realize the people who made you smile, laugh, and giggle are no longer around. You look at these photos as a journey down memory lane but in reality deep down somewhere, you wish you could experience these moments just once more. There’s nothing wrong with having a glance at the past but substituting the past for the present and yearning for it is dangerous. The past has a captivating effect that makes us fall in love it because it helps ignite a sense of happiness and comfortability. You can see the idea of never wanting to let go of the past go in “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. “A Rose…
Because this is a short paper focusing on your application of a particular theory, you do not need to incorporate any outside research into your argument; you should, however, use this assignment as a stepping-stone toward your literary analysis paper by offering an abbreviated version of your (tentative) thesis statement and argument.…
These two characters are much like us in society today. We are all lost in the stigma society places upon us to look and act like someone else. Longing to be free of the constraints society has placed upon us of being shackled down by our possessions and obsessions. We have accepted these pressures placed upon us which society uses to define us as a person and how we live today. We are pawns of what society dictates, which creates the social monster within all of us.…
In the era of the 1980’s, New York City was going through a calamitous time, as the crack cocaine epidemic unleashed a wave of crime and addiction, and government mismanagement caused near bankruptcy of the city. Due to a decrease of manufacturing in the city, an economic downturn ensued, which in turn caused a shortage of affordable housing, and low levels of public assistance payments, such as welfare. The combination of these elements, caused a rise of family homelessness. The city responded to the crisis by placing the families, in hotels as temporary “housing”. Amongst these families, were Pietro’s. The downfall of his family can be rooted to three major affairs; him losing his job, being placed in The Martinique, and his son’s, Christopher,…