Imagine living a solid and tranquil life with a full family, but, one day, each person in your family leaves the home to never return. For some people, this is real life and, for Kya, this is nowhere near imagination. In the coming of age novel, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Kya is left to fend for herself as her entire family leaves her alone with her abusive father. When the body of a local kid is found dead, she is thought to be the main suspect. Throughout the story, Kya learns to reinvent herself and her ways of living, both from observing her families’ strategies of survival and from what nature teaches her. Kya was not always alone, she grew up with the rest of her family for the majority of her life. Throughout this time, she has watched and …show more content…
‘Who’s gonna cook?’ she asked out loud. She lit a candle and poked at the hot ashes in the woodstove, adding kindling. Pump the bellows till a flame is caught, then more wood. Getting out leftovers, she said, ‘I’ll tump the grits in lard, warm ‘em up,’ which she did and ate from the pot, looking through the window for Pa. But he didn’t come to see it. (Owens 14) From watching her mother throughout her life, she has taken with her some memory of how to cook simple things, such as grits or turnip greens. As she is now left alone, she has to change her ways of life, such as providing for herself and observing her family in years prior has helped her do that. Even though she was slightly lost when she first realized she was alone and had no one to cook food for her, she still found a way to make her own food with no one to tell her what to do. Kya did certainly learn a lot from observing her family members, but as she was left to entertain herself in the marsh for many hours every day, nature had just as big a toll on her. “Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the
Don’t you wish you could go back in time to change those bad memories? That’s what Lionel Sherbousekis going through in a short story called “Goin’ Fishin’”. Chris Crutcher wrote Athletic Shorts and the story “Goin’ Fishin’” is about a boy whose father loved fishing and while their family was fishing one day a boat full of drunk kids smashing into them but Lionel luckily save the boat before it hit and jumped off. This is what the main character in “Goin Fishin” was feeling when his family died in a boating accident.
All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg is an autobiography that starts from Mr. Bragg's impoverished childhood in a family that included an abusive, alcoholic father, an incredibly powerful angel of a mother and his two brothers, and follows him through his Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistic career at the New York Times. The author states at the beginning of the book that readers will laugh and cry reading it. He was right on the money with both of these points.
Miguel Castaneda is the narrator and main character of the story “We Were Here”. Miguel is a young teenager from Stockton, California. He is dark complected because of his Mexican background but he does not have the personality to do the work like that of his Mexican relatives. I know this because in the story it says, “Told us we might be dark on the outside, but inside we were like a couple blonde boys from Hollywood.” He is very different from the rest of his family in terms of being able to handle situations that are put in front of him and completing the task at hand.
Originally the narrator admired her father greatly, mirroring his every move: “I walked proudly, stretching my legs to match his steps. I was overjoyed when my feet kept time with his, right, then left, then right, and we walked like a single unit”(329). The narrator’s love for her father and admiration for him was described mainly through their experiences together in the kitchen. Food was a way that the father was able to maintain Malaysian culture that he loved so dearly, while also passing some of those traits on to his daughter. It is a major theme of the story. The afternoon cooking show, “Wok with Yan” (329) provided a showed the close relationship father and daughter had because of food. Her father doing tricks with orange peels was yet another example of the power that food had in keeping them so close, in a foreign country. Rice was the feature food that was given the most attention by the narrator. The narrator’s father washed and rinsed the rice thoroughly, dealing with any imperfection to create a pure authentic dish. He used time in the kitchen as a way to teach his daughter about the culture. Although the narrator paid close attention to her father’s tendencies, she was never able to prepare the rice with the patience and care that her father
To start off, a key point that ended up in a shift of the author’s beliefs upon her culture was demonstrated in the quote, “On Christmas Eve I saw that my mother had outdone herself in creating a strange menu. She was pulling black veins out of the backs of fleshy prawns.The kitchen was littered with appalling mounds of raw food.” This quote is essential to the disrespectful tone of of the story. Amy is extremely condescending of her culture and seems embarrassed of her culture and its food.
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...
She would mostly be alone and sit by herself being buried in books or watching cartoons. In high school she attended a program for troubled adolescents and from there she received a wide range of support from helping her get braces to helping her get information to attend community college. (59) Even with this she was already too emotionally unstable due to her family issues and felt like she couldn’t go through with her dreams to travel and even go into the art of culinary. She suffers from psychological problems such as depression and worries constantly about almost every aspect in her life from work to family to her boyfriend and just hopes that her life won’t go downhill. (60) Overall Kayla’s family structure shows how different is it now from it was in the 1950’s as divorce rates have risen and while before Kayla’s type of family structure was rare now it is becoming more common. This story helps illustrate the contributions of stress that children possess growing up in difficult homes in which they can’t put their own futures first they must, in some cases, take care of their guardian’s futures first or others around them. Again, this adds into the inequality that many face when it comes to being able to climb up the ladder and become successful regardless of where one
The youth are acknowledged for having innocence, and witnessing certain events can take it away. In Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay experiences cause innocence to be lost. Losing freedom affects an individual personality, making the person more mature. Losing hope causes an individual to change their views on life. A person’s family dying causes a lifetime of pain. When experiencing a horrible event, one should not let it change them.
One can learn responsibility through experience, whether the experience is great, or if it is tragic. In The Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes, twelve year old Lanesha demonstrates her growth by bringing her and others to safety during a deadly storm. Once nurtured and cared for by her non-biological grandmother, Lanesha learns to take care of herself and others. This significance shows her transitioning from a girl to a young woman.
This documentary is about two girls’ journey as they are released from their juvenile home after committing a crime. At first glance, these two girls look the same; both of them committed some sort of crime and ended up in a juvenile home. Throughout the documentary, Shanae is seen as someone who wants to change because of her past mistake. On the other hand, Megan struggles more because she is starved for love. What makes this girls circumstances different is that Shanae has a family that loves her and want her to get better, while Megan comes from a broken home where her mom is constantly in jail. In order to understand both Megan and Shanae’s struggle, the labeling theory is one of the theories that fit their situation.
“Girl” makes the impression that the mother wants the daughter to take over the “women’s” work around the house as well as she tells her which day to wash the white clothes Monday, wash the colored clothes on Tuesday, and she is teaching her how to iron her father’s clothes the way he likes them done and how to sew on a button; “This is how to make a button-hole for the button you have just sewed on.” (380) The mother also is teaching her daughter how to cook for the family. “Cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil,” (380) so that everyone will eat them. The mother also discusses table manners, “always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn some-one else’s stomach.”
When faced with a life altering situation although Molly’s characteristics and personality aid her in courageously defying them, the effects of facing this traumatic event will lead to long term psychological repercussions. When severe harm is inflicted on a person’s psyche, it is viewed as an emotional trauma (Levers, 2012). The emotional harm inflicted on Molly’s psyche originates from different dimensions; like her upbringing, her trauma is multidimensional too. As a child of the Indigenous community, whose ancestors and elders were killed violently in inter-group conflicts, and whose children were forcefully removed from families, Molly is would experience intergenerational trauma (Atkinson, 2002). Intergenerational trauma is trauma passed down from one generation to another; as a close knitted community group, the grief experienced by family members of losing their loved ones, would have been transferred across generations (Atkinson,
At the age of ten, most children are dependent on their parents for everything in their lives, needing a great deal of attention and care. However, Ellen, the main character and protagonist of the novel Ellen Foster, exemplifies a substantial amount of independence and mature, rational thought as a ten-year-old girl. The recent death of her mother sends her on a quest for the ideal family, or anywhere her father, who had shown apathy to both she and her fragile mother, was not. Kaye Gibbons’ use of simple diction, unmarked dialogue, and a unique story structure in her first novel, Ellen Foster, allows the reader to explore the emotions and thoughts of this heroic, ten-year-old girl modeled after Gibbons’ own experiences as a young girl. Kaye Gibbons’ experiences as a child are the foundations for this.
The author of This Dark Endeavor is Kenneth Oppel and the ever-occurring theme throughout the book is the effects of determination and jealousy. Kenneth Oppel is a writer from Canada who tells the story of the two Frankenstein brothers, Victor and Konrad in Geneva, Switzerland. He wanted this book to serve as the prelude to the classic story of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The novel centers the story around Victor Frankenstein and his role in saving his twin Konrad Frankenstein.