Character:
The main character in Pieces of Me is Maddie. Maddie is a teenager who ran away from home, because she didn’t get along very well with her mom’s boyfriend. Maddie is a confident, independent girl. She got around by herself and didn’t interact with others very much. After a few months of living on her own she met a guy named Q. Her and Q got along very well, but at first she wasn’t very open with him. The farther the book went on, the closer they got. Maddie didn’t have very much faith in Q that he would work things out, but she still stayed with him. She was very caring and motherly to Leo and Dylan. She told the kids, “... to me its like i'm your mom...” (page 222) .She treated them like they were her own children. After Q and Leo had gone off, the book says “ I pulled Dylan onto my lap and held him tightly...” (page 208) ;she was trying to protect Dylan which I think is why the author included this.
Ideas:
This book is about a teenage girl named Maddie living on the streets. She meets a homeless guy named Q and they start a family with two little boys they meet. In the first chapter Maddie is described and Q tells her where some good places to get free food are. They start talking and she moves in with him in his car. The next few chapters are about them and how they get along. One day Maddie met a woman and her kids. Maddie was babysitting the oldest kid, Dylan, and the mom never picked him back up. Right away Maddie figured out what was going on. In the book says “They weren’t coming back for him...” (page 81)They decided to take him in. Later in the book Q is playing poker to get some extra cash and ends up winning a boy that is being auctioned off. The boy, Leo, moves in with them. Through out the whole boo...
... middle of paper ...
...and never came back. The author shows us this by writing in the book, “Q was gone” (page 211) I think the author added this event to add suspense to the book. This was the perfect spot in the book for this to happen. Things were already falling down hill with them being broke and Q leaving made it worse. Maddie ended up finding Leo and bringing him home. This was important because it added feeling to the story. Maddie took the kids to an abandoned apartment the next day because they didn’t have enough money to pay the rent. Later that night, Leo explained why he was being auctioned off earlier in the story and he figured out his parents wanted him. He went back to his family and Dylan and Maddie went to foster care. Even though it was sad I think this event was needed. I think the author wrote this as the ending to show that perfect endings aren’t always possible.
The fourth Chapter of Estella Blackburn’s non fiction novel Broken lives “A Fathers Influence”, exposes readers to Eric Edgar Cooke and John Button’s time of adolescence. The chapter juxtaposes the two main characters too provide the reader with character analyses so later they may make judgment on the verdict. The chapter includes accounts of the crimes and punishments that Cooke contended with from 1948 to 1958. Cooke’s psychiatric assessment that he received during one of his first convictions and his life after conviction, marring Sally Lavin. It also exposes John Button’s crime of truancy, and his move from the UK to Australia.
The story, “Good Country People,” by Flannery O’Connor, is a third person limited narration which means the reader can only look into the mind of only a few of the characters. Those characters are Mrs. Hopewell and Hulga, or Joy. Schmoop discusses a deeper understanding about the narrator of the story.
involved troubling situations. Look at how she grew up. The book starts off during a time of Jim
In the novel, Beauty by Robin Mc Kinley, the family of a wealthy merchant looses their wealth when the shipment boats get lost at sea. There are three daughters named Hope, Grace, and Honour, whom is nicknamed Beauty, and a father. The family is forced to move to the country and start a life more modest than accustomed. After the family adapts to country life, one of the older sisters gets married to an iron worker who used to work at the shipyard owned by the father. They have babies. Life goes on in the country.
The book “Dead Girls Don’t Lie” written by Jennifer Shaw Wolf focuses on a variety of different ideas and topics, mostly fixating the murder of the main character’s best friend Rachel. With this also comes gang violence, lost and found relationships, and the fact that some people will go to great extents in order to keep a lethal secret from the public eye. Rachel and Jaycee were best friends up until 6 months before where the book started. But, an altercation between them caused the breakup of their long lasted friendship. It is soon found out that Rachel was shot through her bedroom window, which is at first suspected to be gang violence. When Jaycee doesn’t answer her phone on the night Rachel was murdered, she received a text that circulates
Straying away from life as a whole only to be alone, some may say is the strong way to heal themselves when dealing with extreme grief or a major crisis . In the book Wild, twenty-two year old Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost it all. Dealing with the loss of her mother, her family torn to pieces, and her very own marriage was being destroyed right before her very eyes. Living life with nothing more to lose, lifeless, she made the most life changing decision of her life. Strayed never seems remorseful on her decisions to up and leave everything behind while deciding to flee from it all. This being her way of dealing with life, it shows her as being strong; a woman of great strength and character. She shows personal strength, which is more than just a physical word. It is a word of very high value and can only be defined by searching deep within your very own soul.
He has them followed so she takes the boys and goes into hiding. The family takes residence in a house where the previous family had been murdered, which they are unaware of at the time. A supporting character, the deputy, is on a mission trying to break the cycle of murders that are happening by burning the houses of where the murders took place. The deputy and Courtney become friends after he helps fight off sheriffs that try to take the boys away. During this time Dylan is being shown murder videos by the children of the dead families. Clint eventually gets custody of the boys, and Courtney goes with them so that they will not get separated. While they are all together, Dylan’s brother Zach becomes possessed by the dead children and decides to make a murder video of his own family. Zach kills his father, and attempts to kill his mother and brother, but is stopped by the deputy. In the end, the deputy breaks the cycle of the murders and saves Courtney and Dylan, while Zach is consumed by Bughuul, an evil spirit. The main character’s role can be viewed as an independent mother who does whatever it takes to keep her boys safe. Although the movie doesn’t show it, Courtney was abused by her ex-husband Clint, which is why she left with the boys in the first place. In most films, the main reason for divorce in families is because the husband is abusive.
The story that Jess Walter tells, much like any other novel, is one of joy and sorrow. Lives intersect and separate, people fall into and out of love, and dreams are made and broken. What Walter does with his plot though is quite different. He writes it in a way where the whole book itself relies on the reader’s ability to realize that though some people meet for only a brief amount of time, their dreams and hopes, can hinge on even the briefest moments. Sometimes the characters in the novel have their stories intersect, some in very interesting ways, and other times you see their story as it is and was, just them. Walter does a wonderful job of bringing together many different lives, many stories, and showing how just because you feel alone, does not mean you are, your life and story can at any moment intersect with another and create a whole different story. Perhaps, Alvis Bender puts the idea that Walter is trying to convey into the best words, “Stories are people. I’m a story, you’re a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we’re less alone.”
In the poem “The One Girl at the Boys’ Party,” Sharon Olds uses imagery to convey pride in her daughter’s growing femininity. What would seem to be another childhood pool party for the girl turns into an event that marks a rite of passage to adulthood. Though the narrator is reluctant of her daughter’s search for an identity, she ultimately sees her daughter’s transformation to womanhood as admirable. Olds’ pride is first shown when the girl begins to lose her innocence from the unfamiliar surroundings of masculine men. The narrator says, “They will strip to their suits, her body hard and indivisible as a prime number” (5-6). The girl’s stiff and confident stature that this image conveys suggests that she is anxious yet willing to progress
Many times when reading a novel, the reader connects with one of the characters and begins to sympathize with them. This could be because the reader understands what the character is going through or because we get to see things from the character’s perspective and their emotions and that in return allows a bond to form for the reader. The character that is the most intriguing for me and the one I found comparing to every book that I read during school was Stacey from the book “Ravensong” Lee Maracle. The character Stacey goes through a lot of internal battle with herself and it’s on her path to discovery that she begins to understand herself and what she’s capable of. Throughout the novel, Stacey has a few issues she tries to work through. This is emphasized through her village and in her school that is located across the bridge in white town. Stacey begins dealing with the loss of Nora, and elder in her town. And this in return begins the chain of events that Stacey begins on the path of self-discovery not only on herself but everyone around her. She begins to see things differently and clearly. Stacey is a very complex and confused character, and she begins to work through these complexities through her thoughts, statements and actions.
Even though, a person likes to think they are in control, life will show them they are in less control than thought they were. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the character Hulga is a person that wants to maintain control in every aspect of her life good or bad. To Hulga it seems she is in constant control of her surroundings and her life. However, she does not have control that she thinks has.
The novel, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011) written by Sherry Turkle, presents many controversial views, and demonstrating numerous examples of how technology is replacing complex pieces and relationships in our life. The book is slightly divided into two parts with the first focused on social robots and their relationships with people. The second half is much different, focusing on the online world and it’s presence in society. Overall, Turkle makes many personally agreeable and disagreeable points in the book that bring it together as a whole.
Vine Deloria, author of The World We Used to Live In, not only introduces his readers to indigenous Native American spirituality and traditional practices including ceremonies but also brings several important ideas of native spirituality to the forefront. He discusses the importance of having and maintaining a relationship with mother earth and all living beings; an interconnectedness with nature in all forms that is crucial to the understanding and practice of Native American spirituality. Dreams and visions were discussed as an important form of communication in indigenous spirituality. The important relationships with animal and plant spirits are discussed. The concept of power and what is considered power in Native Spirituality. Deloria talks about the importance of place in indigenous spirituality. It is believed that power and wisdom rests in places. The landscape holds memories of all that has ever happened. Through all the aspects Deloria discusses in his book, readers get a clear view and better understanding of Native American spirituality through various accounts of different tribal activities and interviews from both emic and etic perspectives of culture. By using a wide range of research, Deloria does a fairly good job of remaining unbiased which is a difficult thing for anyone to do.
The book then jumped in time to three months later. The boys were tried as juveniles and sentenced to nine months in juvenile detention, and two years on probation. Zach on the other hand had successfully committed suicide.
An individual’s welfare can be explained as their state of contentment that can be achieved throughout one’s life. Increasing this state of well-being can be obtained by pursuing and gaining what is intrinsically good for the individual. Experientialism states that subjective experiences are the sole things which are intrinsically good and capable of promoting welfare in individuals. The plausibility of this view arises from the fact that we desire experiences not just for their instrumental benefits, but because they are good ‘in and of themselves’. This view has faced some fervent opposition though, most strongly in the form of Nozick’s Experience Machine. Robert Nozick conveys that experiences are not the only things that are intrinsically good and that we desire genuine connections to reality as well. In response to this, I will present Shelly Kagan’s argument that genuine connections to reality are unrelated to an individual’s welfare and therefore, cannot contribute to the well-being of an individual and Experientialism remains standing as a strong philosophical theory.