Cara and I decided to read the book called “Help! A story about friendship” by Holly Keller. The story was about a friendship between a mouse and a snake. The mouse was scared of his best friend snake because someone spread a rumor about his best friend. Shunk told rabbit and rabbit told mouse that snakes like to eat animals like him. The mouse was so freaked out about it that he wasn’t paying attention to where he was walking. He ended up getting stuck in a hole worrying about what he was told and the only person that could get him out was snake. Snake had everyone tie a stick to his leg so that he could get mouse out of the hole. That’s when mouse relies that he needed to apologize to snake and stop listening to rumors spread by others. So
The Joy Luck Club is the first novel by Amy Tan, published in 1989. The Joy Luck Club is about a group of Chinese women that share family stories while they play Mahjong. When the founder of the club, Suyuan Woo, died, her daughter June replaced her place in the meetings. In her first meeting, she finds out that her lost twin sisters were alive in China. Before the death of Suyuan, the other members of the club located the address of June’s half-sisters. After that, they send June to tell her half-sisters about her mother’s life. In our lives there are events, and situations that mark our existence and somehow determine our life. In this novel, it shows how four mothers and their daughters were impacted by their tradition and beliefs. In the traditional Asian family, parents define the law and the children are expected to follow their requests and demands; respect for one’s parents and elders is critically important. Traditions are very important because they allow us to remember the beliefs that marked a whole culture.
Language, details, and actions are used to make the readers feel sympathy for the snake. In the story, the snake is very relaxed, calm and non-aggressive. When the snake is first noticed, its head is not “drawn back to strike” the man. This shows that the snake is not being aggressive, which means that it’s intentions were not to fight the man. The snake also “held his ground with calm watchfulness”.The
Too many minors have committed violent crimes and haven’t gotten the consequences they deserved. In Time magazine article, “Children without Pity” written by Nancy Traver, it shows how the crime rates are going up and many minors aren’t getting the consequence they need. Given the violence of their actions, minors who commit violent crimes should be tried as adults.
In The Book of Stories Beginnings by Kristin Kladstrup, Lucy Martin found her great-uncle's The Book of Stories Beginning and began writing her own story beginnings in the enchanted journal. She wrote about her father being a great magician. Everything written in the journal came to life. Lucy's father turned himself into a raven using his magic potion and flew across the ocean to a mythical land called Cat'n'berd Island. Lucy Martin and her great-uncle, Oscar Martin, went on a search to find Lucy's lost father and save him from King Bertram. Kristina Kladstrup was born Sioux City, Iowa. When she was a child, she loved reading and writing and she decided that becoming a writer would be her vocation. The house that her mother lived in when she was a child inspired the setting of Kladstrup’s novel. Kladstrup had also written two other children books which are Garden Princess and Le Livre Des Débuts D'histoires. She had co-written two children's books. One is A Night In Santa's Great Big Bag with Tim Jessell and the other is The Gingerbread Pirates with Matt Tavares. I chose The Book of Story Beginnings because a friend recommended it to me. She said it was set in an island far away from Iowa. I enjoy reading about adventures to distant magical lands, so I agreed to read this book. Upon finishing to book, the ending of the book was different from what I had predicted. I thought that after Oscar helped Lucy find her father, Oscar
After reading The Liars Club an autobiography by Mary Karr, my interpretation of the reading is that she is telling her story from her point of view as a child and as an adult, utilizing foreshadowing and vivid imagery. For example, the reading states “My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark.” “I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor” (Karr 3). This passage also brought some significance to the story as discussed in class. This helps the reader to understand that a very young age Mary Karr experienced something that was traumatic and it as stuck with her, therefore she labeled is one of her sharpest childhood memories. Usually when things happen to us as children we are not able to remember them exactly in detail, but when they are traumatic events those memories tend to stick with us throughout life. While writing Karr takes the role of two characters, those include the character “Pokey”. In the story this is a representation of Mary Karr a child. Her father Pete calls her Pokey. During this time frame Mary isn’t too aware of what is happening to her, she admires her father, and is also of her sisters. As I continued to read the story the next character that Mary Karr takes on is the narrator or author. This is referenced throughout the story when she looks back on her childhood to try and understand what was happening to her. A good example of this is when the author uses breaking of the fourth
The most compelling character of this novel was Aibileen, an African-American maid working her days taking care of precious Mae Mobley Leefolt and the Leefolt’s house. She cooked and cleaned and earned little to no pay while doing so. Aibileen faced many conflicts throughout this book such as working through her son, Treelore’s death as well as raising a white two year old in a strict white woman’s house. She taught this girl to learn to love herself because her own mother was not. “Gave Mae Mobley one more hug, whisper, ‘You a smart girl. You a good girl.’” (Stockett 111) The biggest conflict Aibileen faced, however, was sitting down everyday and being interviewed by Skeeter Phelan who was a privileged white girl trying to make it as a writer. Skeeter asked Aibileen questions about what it is like to work as a maid, the challenges she faced daily, and trying to overcome the segregation gap in Jackson, Mississippi. As hard as it was, Aibileen answered all of these questions honestly in attempts to help Skeeter publish a book about working as a black woman during that time. Aibileen was developed well by the author because she showed the relationships she developed with white characters such as Skeeter and Mae Mobley. During that day and age, a black woman working together with a white woman was unheard of. Throughout The Help, Aibileen was going against the norm of society to try and find peace in this splintered town which made
The Loving Story by writers Nancy Buirski and Susie Ruth Powell is based around Mildred Loving and her husband Richard Loving, a mixed-marriage couple in Virginia. Mildred is half African-American and Cherokee and Richard is White and together they committed miscegenation by marrying each other and living in Caroline County, VA. In 1958 they were arrested and Court of Virginia banished them and made them leave the state. They relocated however, they wasn’t satisfied with the busy city streets of Washington, D.C. Which resulted in Mildred writing a concerning, heartfelt, and detailed letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He wrote her back suggesting she get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union. On June 12, 1967, The Supreme Court made a unanimous decision; “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State”. (Buirski and Powell). The Loving versus Virginia case overturned bans against interracial marriage in 16 states. After nine years of exile from Virginia, they was finally welcomed back. Although the outcome was successful, the Loving family still struggled with the journey to fight for their rights to be married and live together. Today, that struggle to fight for human rights has veered towards the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender LGBT community. Do the LGBT community have the same basic human rights as interracial couples? Well,
2) Shoes- This word is important because for Kate to become a guitar player, she needs to have the perfect shoes. “When Kate decided to play the guitar, she realized she would need new shoes… All her life, she had worn gym shoes, running shoes, soccer cleats, hiking boots, and red Chuck Taylor high-tops, whatever kind of sports shoe made the most sense at the time… But as a future guitar player, Kate had new wardrobe responsibilities.” (pg 1) She is obsessed with
In the novel, ‘Jasper Jones’ Craig Silvey uses the theme friendship to encourage the reader to respond in a sympathetic way to the characters in the novel. ‘Jasper Jones’ is a story about a teenage boy, Charlie Bucktin, who one night is told to sneak out of his room by another boy called Jasper Jones. Jasper takes Charlie to a spot down by the river and reveals a dead girl hanging from a tree, Laura Wishart. Charlie of stunned and scared but Jasper persuades him not to tell anyone and that they must figure out who did this to her. Charlie is faced with many problems throughout this journey and is forced to grow up and become more mature. He makes many new friends because of this secret. Silvey uses the narrative conventions and language techniques;
In “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova, social media has significantly changed the way we interact with friends and family. Everybody thinks that using social media is the best way to talk to friends and family, however, in my opinion, they are wrong because it doesn’t give you the face-to-face connections we need as humans for social interaction. On the other hand, the great thing about using social media is you can connect with more people, but in a superficial kind of way. Therefore, we do not get the face-to-face interactions with our friends and family. We, the people that are addicted to social media, learn that without face-to-face conversations we wouldn’t have a normal “social” life outside of social media. The question
The book , The Help by Kathryn Stockett, is about a women named Aibileen who is a black maid. She is taking care of her 17th white baby now. She works for a woman named Miss Leefolt. Aibileen has never disobeyed an order in her life and never intends to do so. Her friend Minny is the exact opposite. When she is around her boss, she has to hold herself back from sassing them all the time. Skeeter Phelan is different than the rest of the white ladies. She thinks that blacks aren’t all that bad. She decides to write a book about the lives of maids for white ladies. Otherwise known as the Help. She with the help of Aibileen and Minny hope to create a book that starts a revolution about what white people think about blacks.
Maria Konnikova's essay "The Limits of Friendship," analyzes the impact of social media on close relationships, addressing the people impacted by social media use. This essay published in The New Yorker, a weekly magazine with scholarly authors, to inform the public on social media's impact on our lives. She finds that social media has created a dependency on technology and online interactions. Konnikova strives to inform that social media is decreasing close relationships, and persuades that it will impact our future. She argues on the impact of increased dependency on social media on the Dunbar number, hindering the development of future generations. Konnikova succeeds using strong logic and scientific reason as well as appealing to emotions; however, she fails to prove her credibility over the topic and instead relies on the credibility of Robin Dunbar.
I remember that it hurt, looking at her hurt. A beautiful line, no doubt, but I mustn’t take credit. I remember seeing her at her best. I remember telling myself that she would get better. I remember seeing what she would post on Facebook and pretending that I thought she wasn’t slowly killing herself. I remember seeing the blades sitting on her desk and throwing them in the trashcan and acting like they didn’t hold any significance, only to repeat the process the next weekend. I remember hearing her stories about falling out of that damned tree and telling myself, “Oh yeah. Those scars could totally be scrapes from the tree bark.” I remember ignoring the brokenness of her smile. I remember not doing anything about it, and I remember foolishly telling myself that it was all in my head.
In Charlotte’s Web we are witness to an odd friendship that evolves from a need to survive into one of deepest respect, understanding, and selflessness. In The Fox and the Hound, we see how the innocence of childhood breaks through the barriers of society’s norms and their friendship develops from similar passions and curiosities - with bonds so strong that neither time nor the pressures of family and work can not break them. In life, as in literature, friendship is an important theme that touches us all. One never knows where or when they will find a friend so stay open and receptive. Smile at that person next to you in the cafeteria, strike up a conversation with the kid next to you on the bus, bake your neighbor some cookies and stay for tea… You may be embarking upon your next tremendous
When you were still in the kindergarten, friends were the people who romped about with you, played mischievous tricks upon everyone. When you were getting bigger, perhaps at primary school, friends were the people who helped you in your homework, who sung with you at the school choir. Had you forgotten them? Had you betrayed them? Are you a good friend to your friends? A true friend would always tell you the truth, be you best partner when you need him, most of all, support you.