Tears Of A Tiger, By Sharon M. Draper

“At about the same time, I was comforting the man who had been hit… He wanted to hold my hand because it was hurting him so bad.”

My book club book, The Roar by Emma Clayton is about a semi-apocalyptic, semi-dystopian, society where there hasn't been any children born for the past 30 years and this is ‘reasonable move’ as Mal Gorman says, because the Animal Plague has been spread rapidly. Not much is known about the animal plague until the very end of the story.

There are many ideas about survival presented in the novel ‘Lion’. At the age of 5, Saroo Brierley became lost on a train. Not knowing where he was from, or the name of his family, he survived on the grueling streets of Calcutta, before being taken into an orphanage and adopted by a family in Australia. The novel ‘Lion’ is a non-fiction, autobiography written by Saroo Brierley himself. ‘Lion’ explores the vital aspects of survival, including sourcing basic necessities, behaving instinctively and being adaptable.

For the past forty years, women have been reported murdered or missing along the highway 16 corridor in Northern British Columbia. The 724- kilometer stretch of road from Prince George to Prince Rupert was given the name “the highway of tears”. In the documentary Highway of Tears by Matt Smiley, the focus of the documentary was to set out and find the root cause of the disappearances and murders and to shed light on the real issue of violence against women and systematic racism in the justice system. The documentary looks at true stories of women who have gone missing or have been murdered along the highway of tears. The documentary focuses on how the highway of tears is the core of a much larger problem of how the indigenous population has been treated since colonialism. (Smiley, 2015) This essay will focus on summarizing the documentary, showing the correlation between the injustice the women and their families have faced and the mainstream and critical theories of victimization, and provide a critical reflection.

In the novel, “In the Skin of a Lion,” by Michael Ondaatje, the main character, Patrick Lewis, searches for identity and light. Without these elements, he lacks love and cannot survive the world. A passage in chapter three describes him as a lonely man that is isolated from the world around him. “Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato- this cluster made up a drama without him. And he himself was noting but a prism that refracted their lives. He searched out things, he collected things. He was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. Born in Abashed, Ontario. What did the word mean? Something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn’t leap.

Gayle Forman said, “Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.” In the story, Ashes, by Susan Beth Pfeffer, Ashleigh’s parents are complete opposites. Her mother is logical and brutally honest, and her father is optimistic and, as he puts it, “a dreamer”. When her father needs money, Ashleigh is faced with a choice: to take money from her mom and damage their relationship, or endanger her father by keeping the money. Ashleigh chooses to take the money from her mother, because she makes it clear that she favors her dad, she agrees to help him even when she knows her mother won’t like it, and she cares much about her father’s well-being.

The irony of such circumstance is that the migrants are there because they were trying to escape from the turmoil of their previous homes. They came for a new start, but found themselves only to be trapped again in a political game of social divisions. The man committed the illegal act for a moment of victory and freedom. An act of resistance is a moment of freedom.

In Tears of a Tiger and Wonder the characters become the Rebel. Andy from Tears of a Tiger lost a friend named Robbie after a horrible car accident. Andy was driving the car while drunk which made him get into an accident and Rob didn't make it out alive. Andy turned into the Rebel after killing his friend because he was so depressed. In comparison, Julian from Wonder also becomes the Rebel. Julian is a 5th grade student who is very popular. Julian never like August when he came into Beecher Prep. Julian writes horrible notes and puts them in August’s locker and mimicked his friends. He also got almost the whole school to turn on August just because he got punched in the face by Jack Will who is one of August’s friends. Andy in Tears of a Tiger and Julian from Wonder are the archetype The Rebel because their goals are to disrupt , they fear a lack of power, and turned to violence.

Although written decades apart, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye both explore the trials and tribulations that young black girls must endure as they begin to step into womanhood. While the burdens that the protagonists in each of these texts differ in some key ways, one of the most interesting things that both Woodson and Morrison depicted was a sense of difficulty in coping with these changes, and rather than having any semblance of mastery over their circumstances, these young protagonists would instead project their emotions onto something else as they try to discover what causes their suffering.

Andrew Clark is one of the main characters in Breakfast Club. He was one of the main characters, but he was not the loudest or most talkative one, he only talked when other people talked to him or when someone was doing something they shouldn’t be doing. He was the most mature out of all the actors in the movie, he was a leader and took control if something got out of hand. He was a popular kid in school, he was on the wrestling team, varsity too. When John, another main character, was mean and offensive to people, Andrew would stick up for them. He was the best kid in school out of everyone in the film, he wanted to be as good as he could be and didn’t want to get in trouble and lose a spot on the Wrestling team.

I can relate the situation Tears of a Tiger to my own life. For example, In the third chapter of Tears of a Tiger and chapter five, you see the conversation between Rhonda and Keisha about the accident and BJ’s prayer. In this chapter, Keisha and Rhonda are talking about what has happened that night. On page ten, it says, “Rhonda, me again. I’m here at the hospital…

When a small plane crashes into the Ecuador’s rainforest two survivors of the crash, the Frenchman Didier and the Belgian man Florent, set out on a journey through the jungle, desperate to find a way out of it. Bit by bit the harsh environment sucks their strength away and it seems that several days of walking don’t bring them any closer to civilization. Then they stumble upon ruins of an ancient city with burial sites and a cave full of gold. They believe it is the legendary treasure gathered by the Incas in the 16th century to pay for release of their emperor, Atahualpa.

The Tasmanian tiger is not actually a tiger. It is a thylacine, a close relative of the Tasmanian devil and a distant relative of the kangaroo. The thylacines have the body of the Tasmanian devil, the tail and pouch of a kangaroo, and the skull of a dog (Stauss). They are known to be clumsy, nocturnal, and extinct (Tasmanian Tiger Facts). The last Tasmanian tiger died in captivity in 1936. However, scientists have a six month-old thylacine pup that has been preserved in alcohol since 1866. The scientists are looking to clone the thylacine and reintroduce it to its natural habitat (Brighton). The problems with resurrecting this animal is that they are known to kill small cattle, their population was declining before humans encountered them, and the animals they prey on are endangered.

When I was age four, my mom and I read the Encyclopedia of Animals together. Turning through one by one, she pointed to the pictures of the animals like adelie penguin and African Bush elephant, the adelie penguin I always remembered mostly because it’s name was brought down to a few coherent syllables as I was too young to say adelie correctly. The book eventually became my favorite thing to become transfixed with when it came time to read. I refused other books if I did not see the distinct tiger on the cover. Later on my mom noticed my added interest in stuffed animals and the neighbors’ dogs and cats. Today, I have concluded that my literacy of animals blossomed from the Encyclopedia of Animals.

Ironically, the contrasting white and black stripes of a white tiger parallel to the recurring theme of the story which encapsulates the struggle between corruption and righteousness throughout the story. The corruption of government was illustrated through the revealing of Balram’s education as a child when his teacher would steal the funds from his students for himself out of desperation which stemmed from the government not giving him his proper payment. The government’s corruption was referred to as the “Darkness” which like the black stripes of a tiger, was a cursed branding shared by everyone of low status in the country. However, for Balram, being known as the “White Tiger,” gave him the character of goodness in opposition to that of