Written by Sarah Dessen, a well-known romance author, Lock and Key is a quick-paced love story which deals with the hardships of accepting love and letting go of love. The touching novel grasps the context of finally moving onto something better while leaving behind everything that was once most important. The protagonist of the Lock and Key, Ruby Cooper, has always looked forward to growing up and turning eighteen years old, so she can finally leave her drug and alcohol addicted mother behind and begin her life as an independent adult. However, her plans are soon soiled once her mother goes missing on her own account, but that does not stop Ruby from living alone. The young woman has been living on her own for a few months, but state services soon find the under-aged girl living alone. She is forced to live with her long-lost sister and her millionaire husband. Ruby has a hard time adjusting, and she soon finds herself in a deep relationship with her new neighbor.
Ruby always thought she could manage to live alone and take care of herself with no problem, after all, she had been su...
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Lee Dugard is an autobiography recounting the chilling memories that make up the author’s past. She abducted when she was eleven years old by a man named Phillip Garrido with the help of his wife Nancy. “I was kept in a backyard and not allowed to say my own name,” (Dugard ix). She began her life relatively normally. She had a wonderful loving mother, a beautiful baby sister,, and some really good friends at school. Her outlook on life was bright until June 10th, 1991, the day of her abduction. The story was published a little while after her liberation from the backyard nightmare. She attended multiple therapy sessions to help her cope before she had the courage to share her amazing story. For example she says, “My growth has not been an overnight phenomenon…it has slowly and surely come about,” (D 261). She finally began to put the pieces of her life back together and decided to go a leap further and reach out to other families in similar situations. She has founded the J A Y C Foundation or Just Ask Yourself to Care. One of her goals was, amazingly, to ensure that other families have the help that they need. Another motive for writing the book may have also been to become a concrete form of closure for Miss Dugard and her family. It shows her amazing recovery while also retelling of all of the hardships she had to endure and overcome. She also writes the memoir in a very powerful and curious way. She writes with very simple language and sentence structures. This becomes a constant reminder for the reader that she was a very young girl when she was taken. She was stripped of the knowledge many people take for granted. She writes for her last level of education. She also describes all of the even...
... within the prison society. The author uses the book to help women in the prison society and outside the enclosed walls find themselves.
parents pulled kids out of schools and the kids that stayed could not look or see Ruby because the principal hid the kids and would not let them play with her at recess . That means the playground was empty . just think what would it be like if there was no one on the playground it would be terrible for me. if there was no one on the playground to play with me. Ruby didn’t just go to that school because the group asked her she wanted to help African Americans get along with white people and to get better education.
The male characters in this book drink, gamble, but only one of them is a rapist and unambitious man. The other men drink, which are Bone 's uncles, but they are better off than the one who is unambitious, Glen. The women in this book are well off because they are strong Boatwright women except for Bone 's mom who lets bad things happen to her child. Bone is the main character in this story and her life is filled with questions until the very end. She has to put up with a abusive step-dad, Glen, and a mother who knows what is going on and letting it get out of control. The aunts in Bone 's family are strong women who have seen and know what is happening to Bone. In this the book the women are strong and carry their problems. Bone carries her secret about Glen abusing her and raping her to herself until one of her Aunts finds her in the bathroom passed out with blood stains on her panty. In this story the house is not a safe place for Bone because of Glen. The home in this situation does help when Bone is staying with her aunts instead of being home with Glen. This book by Allison and the short stories by Carver are tied together in some way or form because they take a specific individual and put a problem that they have to deal with at
lead to. In the story "Eveline" a young woman is confused about what to do with
Connie, a stereotypical fifteen year old girl, views her life and her family with dissatisfaction. Jealous around her twenty-four year old sister, June, despite June’s outward plainness, and tense around her irksome mother, Connie escapes to the mall with her friends. She and her clique of friends feel like they own the place, and the rest of the world: “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home…” (1-2). The sense of freedom intoxicates them.
Restraints are set by parents on their children to aid with the developmental process and help with the maturity level. Restrictions and the ability to control exist in our society and our lives. We encounter restraints daily: job, doors, people, and the most frequently used and arduous become intangible. In the following stories tangible and intangible scenarios are presented. Autonomy, desires, and talents spurned by the husbands in John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums and Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The authors share views regarding a similar theme of male domination and imprisonment. “The Yellow Wallpaper” involves the treatment of a depressed woman who is driven insane in a male imposed detention in her own room. On the other hand, Elisa Allen in the “The Chrysanthemums” struggles internally to find her place in a fully male dominated society with definite gender roles. The mirror-like situations bring upon a different reaction for both the women in different ways. The importance of symbolism, control from their husbands, and the lack of a healthy marriage will be discussed in this paper in two stories.
Within the thin exterior of the cold dark building she called home, she wanted to keep the bodies of those in which she felt she had a connection. Whether it be a reasonable connection or not, she didn’t want to be alone. Her connection with her father brought her to keeping his corps in the house as well as the other man. Her distance from other people around her only drove her to madness causing nothing but isolation and a craving for any type of relation she could hold or be close
On her first day of school, Ruby, with her mother beside her, was escorted by four marshals due to the angry whites who were protesting and yelling at 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, she walked through the entire crowd of whites without being intimidated. However, she only became startled when she had seen a woman waving a black baby doll placed in a tiny coffin in the air. Ruby and her mother spent her first day at school in the principal’s office due to the chaos throughout the school. Many parents took their children out of William Frantz Elementary School, some parents took their children out permanently. During the year, a rumor that Ruby might be poisoned spread like wildfire throughout the school, keeping her off the playground and out of the school cafeteria where other students ate lunch. The Bridges family was affected immensely by Ruby’s appearance at William Frantz Elementary School. Abon, Ruby's father, lost his job because whites had threatened to boycott the business where he worked, and many grocery stores refused to welcome Lucille, Ruby’s mother, as a customer. Furthermore, Ruby's grandparents were evicted from their farm. Although there were a few families who gave support to the Bridges family, some helped the family by giving Abon a job opportunity as a house painter and neighbors offered to babysit the Bridges' children.
The novel The Glass Castle, written by Jeannette Walls, brings to the surface many of the the struggles and darker aspects of American life through the perspective of a growing girl who is raised in a family with difficulties financially and otherwise. This book is written as a memoir. Jeannette begins as what she remembers as her first memory and fills in important details of her life up to around the present time. She tells stories about her family life that at times can seem to be exaggerated but seemed normal enough to her at the time. Her parents are portrayed to have raised Jeannette and her three siblings in an unconventional manner. She touches on aspects of poverty, family dynamics, alcoholism, mental illness, and sexual abuse from
With the main character Celie, she overcomes her hardships with her childhood and marriage to achieve complete happiness. Her childhood consists of a father that rapes her and gives her kids away. He also gives her away to a man known as Mr. ___. He too beats her and does not allow her to see her sister, Nettie. Celie falls in love with another woman who allows her to start her life over. Shug Avery gets her away from her husband, Mr. ___, and allows her to start her own financially independent life, as a pant producer. The only thing Celie lacks in order to ac...
Jeannette started to lose faith in her parents after they could no longer provide for her, and swore that she would make a better life for herself. “I swore to myself that it (her life) would never be like Mom’s…” (Walls 208) Jeannette has the idea to move to New York to escape her parents, and pursue her dream of being a journalist. She decides that her older sister, Lori, will have to escape with her, because Jeannette would never leave Lori alone with her parents. The next day, Jeannette buys a piggy bank to start an “escape fund”. To make money, Lori would draw and paint posters for kids at school and sell them for a dollar fifty. Jeannette would babysit and do other kids homework. She made a dollar per assignment and and babysat for a dollar an hour.
Jeanette mentions that her mom is homeless, and digs through dumpsters. On the other hand, Jeanette has Persian rugs, and a leather armchair in her apartment (6). The writer wears pearls, while her mom is searching for something to eat (6). Jeanette and her mother are extreme opposites because Jeanette 's mother enjoys being homeless, and Jeanette worries about her parents being homeless. It is difficult for the writer to enjoy her apartment, without worrying about her parents being homeless (6). Jeanette 's mother tells her not to worry about them, and to tell people the truth about her parent 's situation (26). The author mentions that her mom had grime on her neck and that she made an effort to fix herself up (9).
Once her husband, John, realizes the deepness of depression that his wife is in due to her birth of their child he decides to take action. He decides to isolate his wife from the world for her own betterment. Once arriving in her newfound place of isolation where there is no stimulation, except for her journal, the narrator is placed within a room that is lined with yellow wallpaper. This yellow room is meant to free her from any stresses, but her dislike for the wallpaper concerns her. The pattern of yellow begins to become more of an obsession, being this is her only stimulation due to her confinement. She begins to visualize a woman behind her yellow wallpaper, this woman she sees seems to be trapped pacing behind the paper as if she is trying to free herself. It is not long before the narrator begins with withdrawal pieces of this wallpaper from the wall in attempt to free this trapped woman. As the novel ends the woman who once was in such disgusted with this yellow room now traps herself, locking herself away from
Nicholas Sparks’ Safe Haven is a very suspenseful novel written from an anti-feminist perspective, in a way that portrays the belief that a woman cannot survive without a man; Sparks uses the main character of the novel, Katie, to be the female of interest in this area. Initially, Katie’s husband, Kevin, is an alcoholic, abusive policeman that she wishes to flee from. Once she finally gets up the courage to leave him, she runs away to a small town, Southport, on the opposite side of the country; since Kevin is employed as a law enforcement official, he has access to exclusive equipment and information and he is able to stalk and find her. Once Kevin finds her, he realizes that she has already fallen in love with another man, Alex, which infuriates