Back Cover Blurb: Have You Ever Thought To Myself?

Her father had loved literature his whole life. Once a book fell on he floor he would pick it up, pat it lovingly and place it back where it belonged. Once he was done with a book he would pass it on to someone who he believed would love it as much as he. It was the greatest way he could show affection, sometimes she believed the only way, the only passion that seemed to colour his once vibrant soul, that seemed to soften a face twisted and distorted by pain. Her mother had left them many years ago, and as she had stolen out silently into the darkness of that warm October night without any sort of warning, she stole pieces of their lives. Tahlia and her father were like a ruined jigsaw puzzle, whose pieces no longer quite fit. She took

Now, here I am. Living with my dad as the dark feelings of misery I had grown accustomed to slowly fade, day by day. As they fade, my perspicuity grows with it because now I know how she is, and how easily anyone can twist a story. I know that I want to go far away; I know that I want to be anything but what she is. I know that, despite what it may seem like on the outside, everything has changed: I can’t bring myself to regret

Parental guidance and support are key components of the foundation of a child’s growth and development. Without either, a child cannot grow and develop properly. In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison examines the effect of different mothers on their respective children through the characters of Mrs. MacTeer and Mrs. Breedlove. Throughout the novel, both characters express their thoughts and feelings through words, with Mrs. MacTeer having a few fussy soliloquies and Mrs. Breedlove having a few interior monologues to get their points across. Although Mrs. MacTeer and Mrs. Breedlove are two entirely different individuals, their respective fussy soliloquies and interior monologues greatly reflect one another.

Amanda Wingfield lives in a world somewhere between reality and her own delusions. As necessary, she closes her eyes and ignores the harsh realities of the real world. She was once a southern belle when she was young. She longs to relive this time, this romantic vision of her past that she clings to. That is a better choice than accepting the reality of her current state of poverty and the accepting of abandonment. She lives each day looking through this fallacy of visions from her memories and dreams. She has no way of reconciling her current status and the one she still dreams of. These two worlds never collide and give her the path towards reality. “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain - your mother received - seventeen! - gentlemen callers!”,

Jimmy neverfinds out the reasons behind that decision. Unlike many women, she quits workingwhen her son goes to school. She continues to do her own research at home on hercomputer, though the specific kind of work remains unstated. Jimmy observes changesin her when she works: “she seemed to be enjoying herself. She was friendly then, too.She was like a real mother and he was like a real child” (30). Her mercurial moodsperplex her son; he describes her as often depressed and sullen. He recounts hisefforts to please her, which often met with annoyance. On good days, Jimmy found hera bit frightening, a bit too much like an image of a perfect mother. She seems like anexample of Chodorow and Contratto’s modern woman, attempting to be the idealmother while working and taking care of her husband (79). Jimmy quickly realizes thathe must bend to his mother’s moods and learns to find ways of getting her attention.More than anything, he seeks to get any reaction out of her, even if it is negative.Jimmy’s common adolescent attention-getting behavior underscores his mother’sneglectful parenting style, eliciting readers’ sympathy for Jimmy.

Loss and loneliness are a bitch, learned Lizabeth Streicher at the early age of seventeen after her beloved mother died from kidney failure, two months before she graduated from high school. Teenage ignorance, believing her mother was invincible, and guilt, believing she somehow could have saved her, dwelled in Lizabeth’s sub-conscience well into her adult life, like a sleeping cancer cell.

The speaker becomes frustrated as people tell her that “time will ease [her] of [her] pain,” but “[they] all have lied” because she has yet to find any relief, despite her best efforts to be patient (1-2). She start to believe that everyone is lying to her to help console her and aid her in moving on from the past. His death becomes problematic for the speaker as she has “hundred of places where [she fears] / To go” because memories come to mind that remind her of her late partner, and she sees him in places where “never fell his shoe or shone his face” (9-10,12). Routine events such as “the weeping of the rain” and the “shrinking of the tide” trigger her emotions, which impedes her as she can not find any consolation to her mourning (3-4). As she tries to find places where he never visited, it only makes the speaker think of her loved one even more. She wants to make herself get past the low point in her life she is experiencing, but can not seem to find a method that is successful. This takes a greater emotional toll on her, and makes her more disheartened and regretful of her choice to listen to people who said that time would help her cope with her pain, which can be heard through the frustrated tone she

Nevertheless, she keeps reminding her mother that she cannot be forced to live a life with which she cannot identify. The conflict between the unrelenting mother and the resistant daughter shows the great divide in thoughts, which appears to dominate the patterns of

Emma Jean’s nightmare of a childhood is to blame for what she did to Perfect Peace. Her mother, Mae Helen Hurt was abusive towards her mentally, emotionally, and physically. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life desperately seeking out her mother’s love; bearing the brunt of her self-hatred instead.

Parents shape a child’s future and sense of self; but, with a father who prefers intoxication over making a steady income and a hopeless artist as a mother, it can be hard to survive, not to mention succeed. Walls, despite the many instances in which her father failed to protect his children, refused to take responsibility for them, and even stole from them, loved him until his dying day. His never-ending source of inspiration and his

Looking into the girl’s eyes’ I could see my mother. I remembered the nights where I lay in bed, listening to the sound of the fighting. My mother would shout, my father would yell back, and then screaming, and whimpering. I remembered how would bury my face into my pillow, hoping I could also bury the problems. My father’s new job in Australia was our ticket to a better life, although it meant leaving my best friend behind.

Its cover so beautiful you may be fooled by, making you think it is just a regular book, but it is all the details hidden in the pages as if steganography was a natural trait of hers. Although, these hidden details might be ripped or wrinkled pages with painful details that she herself will only let a few read, these pages contain the secret to her maturity even though these are not as colorful details as the other pages on her book. To me these painful passages in her book are what make everything about her so beautiful, because I understand now, that when she says something it is deeply coming from her heart and her soul, almost as if we both were awakening out of the same shell but put there for different

A person's confidence automatically increases when they are praised for their progress. However, the lack of a strong parental figure leads an individual to do unnatural things in the search for love and acceptance. The beginning of the novel presents several interwoven stories that share a similar pattern of neglected children changing their personalities in order to be acknowledged. Often one must surrender to their circumstances and accept appreciation wherever they can find it. Victor's mother, Caroline, had to “procure plain work; she plaited straw; and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support” her life because her father would rather die than

Finally the protagonist’s return to sanity and to human existence is marked by her recognition that she must have food and shelter to survive and that she is neither animal nor primitive god and is therefore incapable of living alone in the wilderness. To live she decides is a responsibility to her parents, to society, to herself. She wants her baby to be the ‘first true human’. She refuses to be a victim and stop thinking that she is powerless. The narrator recognizes her past problems with Joe and wants to solve it by avoiding each other and began to talk so she is no longer inclined to have imperfect relationship and predictable failures. It is on this note that the novel ends. It is full of hope.

While the speaker is not always her, and should not always be assumed to be the author, they seamlessly pair up with her life experiences. Her poems, and her novel simulate a ride on the road of depression, and mental illness, leaving the reader with an everlasting, chilling