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Character development introduction
Character development introduction
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The Kind of Friends We Used to Be
SOAPSTONE
*In The Kind of Friends We Used to Be, there are two main characters, Kate and Marylin, but I’m just going to do Marylin for the parts where information about only a single character is needed.
Characters
Marylin is a cheerleader who cares too much about makeup and her hair. “Marylin was now a middle-school cheerleader and cared too much about her hair… she was a big believer that life could be just the way it looked in girls’ magazines, where you and all your Best Friends Forever got together before school started and made crafty decorations for your lockers and traded fingernail polish tips... Marylin believed that life could be sparkly all the time... It just took a little extra work and some lip gloss, and life would be like a TV show everyone wanted to watch.” (pgs 3-4) Because Marylin is now a cheerleader, she believes that everything she does reflects who she is, so she has to be pink and sparkly and absolutely perfect all the time, or else people won’t like her. “‘Seventh grade is a time for, I don’t know, hanging out with your group of friends and getting ready for high school. It’s about finding your own personal style.’” (pg 22) She doesn’t like to color outside the lines; she wants to be exactly who you would think a cheerleader would be. Her personality is very preppy and girly, so she tends to talk a lot and be very enthusiastic and overly dramatic about things. But her main problem is she doesn’t know how to have a real friend. “What an interesting experience, she thought later… To have a conversation and feel okay about it afterward. Quite frankly, Marylin hadn’t known that was possible.” (pg 167) This happened after Marylin had been talking with Kate, who she used to b...
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...y are. Instead of just knowing that they have different interests, hobbies, and looks, you are also able to see how they both think and react to things. I think that this is helpful when you are reading, because you get to see details that you maybe didn’t catch or that weren’t there before, and it’s interesting to see the same thing from different points of view.
Order
Most of the events in The Kind of Friends We Used to Be happen in chronological order. Sometimes, though, an event will be written in Marylin’s point of view, and then the same event is repeated in Kate’s point of view. It’s nice to be able to see the same event from two different perspectives, because it gives you more details about the event, which helps you to have more understanding of the story. It also helps you to think more about what’s happening because you’re seeing it two different ways.
Alexander Stowe is a twin, his brother is Aaron Stowe. Alex is an Unwanted, Aaron is a Wanted, and their parents are Necessaries. Alex is creative in a world where you can’t even see the entire sky, and military is the dream job for everyone and anyone. He should have been eliminated, just like all the unwanteds should have been. He instead comes upon Artimè, where he trains as a magical warrior- after a while. When he was still in basic training, and his friends were not, he got upset, he wants to be the leader, the one everyone looks up to.
Across Five April's by Irene Hunt is about how the civil war tears apart a family during the hard times of the civil war. There were 239 pages it this story. The book follows the life of Jethro Creighton, a young farm boy in rural Illinois as he grows from a protected and provided for nine year old, to a educated and respectable young adult during the chaos of the civil war.
The book “A Long Way From Chicago” is an adventurous and funny story. The story takes place at Joey Dowdel’s Grandmothers farm house in the country. Joey and his sister Mary Alice were sent to their Grandma’s house during the summer because their parents had to go to Canada for their work. At first, Joey felt uncomfortable with his Grandmother because he had never met her before but eventually he got to know her and they became close friends.
The article “A Letter To My Younger Self” written by Terrance Thomas is made to motivate readers, especially teenagers that share similar concerns and emotions as the author’s younger self. By writing a letter to his younger self, Terrance created a motivational and melancholic tone. The style of writing is, therefore, informal with a poetic touch to it. The article is written to motivate readers which results in it to have a motivational and melancholic tone. “Those moments of fear, inadequacy, and vulnerability that you have been running from, are the moments that will shape you.”.
There are many policy issues that affect families in today’s society. Hunger is a hidden epidemic and one major issue that American’s still face. It is hard to believe that in this vast, ever growing country, families are still starving. As stated in the book Growing Up Empty, hunger is running wild through urban, rural, and even suburban communities. This paper will explore the differing perspectives of the concerned camp, sanguine camp, and impatient camp. In addition, each camps view, policy agenda, and values that underlie their argument on hunger will be discussed.
Susanna at the Beach, by Herbert Gold, presents a tale of the virtues characters admire strictly contrasting with the vices for which characters are consumed. The characterization of the main character, Susanna, is portrayed as embodying seven “heavenly virtues” including chastity, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness, humility, and charity. While the other characters in the story personify the seven “deadly sins” including lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, and greed. Herbert Gold depicts a theme of virtues versus vices utilizing the literary device of characterization in Susanna at the Beach as supported by the character depiction from the biblical reference of Daniel and Susanna.
Sarah is friends with Helen. Sarah and Helen sneak into Sarah’s parents liquor cabinet. There seems to be a little bit of envy between the two girls. Sarah’s aren’t around as much as Helens parents are. Helen stated that her mother is always home when she get there, and Sarah paused and changed the subject. I think that Sarah maybe a little more fortunate then Helen money wise, but she falls short when it comes to family. Mary Catherine did an excellent job transforming into Sarah. She was very young and vibrant and lively. I never would have thought that she played a mother into other scene. Her even seemed different, it sounded younger versus her sounding older in the other scenes. Her body language was also different, she carried herself very differently. Mary Catherine’s ability to transform into Sarah made this my favorite characterization.
In the story on page 37 and 38, Jenny tells the readers about how Kate has changed so much since she went to high school. “Kate had gone to high school leaving me back in 7th grade. Suddenly she didn’t want to go to the library anymore. She wanted to go to the mall. When we go to the pool, she didn’t actually want to go in the water, she wanted to lie around in her bikini and work on her tan. These things were kind of boring to me”. This shows that Jenny is doing things that Kate likes but she doesn't. Jenny needs to figure out how not to be disappointed if her friends change because it is going to happen no matter what.
BIOGRAPHY: According to the entry « Eudora Welty » found on Wikipedia, Eudora Alice Welty was an American author and photographer, well-known for working on the South American theme. She began higher education at the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York, where she studied at Columbia University until 1931. Unable to find a job on the East Coast because of unemployment due to the Great Depression, she went back to her her native city Jackson, Mississippi. She started to publish short stories in magazines from 1936 and rapidly acquired notoriety as a short story writer, managing to carefully describe the culture and the racial issues of the South. Each publication of her short stories collections was considered as a literary event. In 1956, her novel The Pounder Heart, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, achieved great success on Broadway. In 1975, her enchanting novel The Robber Bridegroom became a musical. In 1973, Eudora Welty received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Three years earlier, she published a collection of photographs that she had taken herself in the years 1930 and 1940, One Time, one Place: Mississippi in the Depression: a work intending to depict the harsh living conditions in Mississippi during the Great Depression. In 1984, at the request of Harvard University Press, she put on paper a lecture that she gave the year before to the students: the work became a bestseller. She died of pneumonia in 2001.
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid presents the hypothetical story of a tourist visiting Antigua, the author’s hometown. Kincaid places the reader in the shoes of the tourist, and tells the tourist what he/she would see through his/her travels on the island. She paints a picturesque scene of the tourist’s view of Antigua, but stains the image with details of issues that most tourists overlook: the bad roads, the origin of the so-called native food, the inefficiency of the plumbing systems in resorts, and the glitches in the health care system. Kincaid was an established writer for The New Yorker when she wrote this book, and it can be safely assumed that majority of her readers had, at some point in their lives, been tourists. I have been a tourist so many times before and yet, I had never stopped to consider what happens behind the surface of the countries I visit until I read this essay. Kincaid aims to provoke her readers; her style of writing supports her goal and sets both her and her essay apart. To the reader, it sounds like Kincaid is attacking the beautiful island, pin-pointing the very things that we, as tourists, wish to ignore. No tourist wants to think about faeces from the several tourists in the hotel swimming alongside them in the oceans, nor do they want to think about having accidents and having to deal with the hospital. It seems so natural that a tourist would not consider these, and that is exactly what Kincaid has a problem with.
August was more of a friend to Lily. They shared many interests. One of these interests was to mix cola with peanuts. Another interest that they shared was that they loved beekeeping. Rosaleen did not have as much in common as Lily did. She was more of a caretaker to Lily than a friend. When they lived with T. Ray she would cook dinner and dress Lily up. Even though Lily does not have much in common with her she still loves her.
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.
Parents tell their children to think first and act second. Most people forget this as illustrated in Yann Martel’s satire “We ate the Children Last,” written in 2004. It starts out with an operation and humans are given a pigs digestive tract to cure cancer. Because the operation made people eat garbage, they gave it to the poor At this point everybody wants to have this operation. When people started going cannibalistic, the government puts them together to eat each other. This started out as a good thing by curing cancer. After that everybody from the poor to the people administering the operation didn’t pause long enough to consider the consequences. Real world examples of people not pausing to consider the consequences are seen frequently, whether, it be on a small or big scale. Yann Martel is saying that
In chapter six and seven of the novel “My Left Foot” by Christy Brown. Christy Brown met the two-dream girls of his life Katriona and Jenny. Katriona was an almoner’s student at the Rotunda Hospital, that she met Christy mother. Mary Brown tolled her a story about Christy. Katriona was fascinated and intrigued about what she heard, therefore She visited Christy and they become very close friends. Jenny was at the same age at Christy. Also Jenny was a famous kid in their street. All the boys wanted to marry her when they grow up. Christy was obsessed with Jenny that he decided to write her a passionate little note. That was the beginning of their friendships, but they don’t last long. These two girls have a different impact on Christy’s life.
In July’s People, Nadine Gordimer gives a very detailed and knowledgeable explanation of the political turmoil within South Africa. By expressing the emotions of a family involved in the deteriorating situation and the misunderstandings between blacks and whites, she adds a very personal and emotional touch, which allows the reader to understand the true horror and terror these people experienced. Gordimer writes of how the Smales family reacts, survives, and adjusts to this life altering experience. She makes obvious throughout the book that prejudice plays a major role in uncovering the reactions of Bamford and Maureen Smales.