The Book of Stories by Kristin Kladstrup

All humans throughout life are faced with the challenge of growing up. Reading Eleven by Sandra Cisneros shows the struggles of an eleven-year-old girl trying to act her age and not any younger. When coming upon an another year of life it can feel exactly like last. This is because no one ever gets rid of the one, two, three, four and five-year-old self that they once represented. Age is simply a number to tell people when they ask. Instead, the obstacles and experiences during those years truly shape a person.

Angela Kydd has her expertise in frail older people and people with dementia. She worked as a nurse for ten years before working in academia. She is an associate professor at Edinburgh Napier University and works as a co-founder of a Pan-University Ageing Research Network. Over the years she has designed and delivered degree and masters programmes and modules in gerontology. She has undertaken research in attitudes to health care professionals working with older people, self-care beliefs of women with diabetes and her PhD thesis was on delayed discharge from a policy and patient perspective. She has also undertaken evaluations of clinical areas and projects. Her latest project was on developing the culture and care in a care home setting, which

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

Teenagers. What did you think about when you read the first sentence? Was it that teens are those one track minded creatures that no one can really understand although they were in fact once a teen themselves. Perhaps you were thinking what causes them to act the way they do? Well, in the essay “The Terrible Teens” by Elizabeth Kolbert, Kolbert gives her insight on teenagers and what causes them to act a certain way with the insert of theories from Frances Jensen and Laurence Steinberg. Kolbert goes on to support the theories that a teenager’s brain isn’t fully developed, why teenagers take more risks due to the temptations and peer pressure. In addition, why violence becomes an issue for teens starting when they’re young.

Those who take the time to fully examine the Holocaust, and its exemplary survivors deal with the unsettling knowledge that those before them over looked. Between the years of 1933 to 1947, the Holocaust prospered through many countries in Europe, including the proximity of one survivor’s homeland, Poland. Alicia: My Story by Alicia Appleman-Jurman is historically famous for it’s shocking relevance throughout its background. It has also been infamous for its brutal unvarnished truth by well-known book reviews, but overall it’s cultural impact on the world has shown it is a lesson that should be known by all.

Claire Standish or “the princess” portrays the stereotypical popular teenage girl in The Breakfast Club. She is in detention with everyone else because she decided to skip class and go shopping, which also plays into the stereotypical teen girl image. It can also be assumed that she is spoiled and rich since her father tried to get her out of detention but failed, and she mentions to the group that her parents only use her to get back at the other one. She brings a fancy lunch of sushi while the other teens either have nothing or the standard lunch one’s parents might pack for them. There are a couple of times in the movie that she brings up her social standing and could even be considered as looking down on those who are not as popular as her. Even closer towards the end of the movie she informs the others that if they were to say hello to her in the hallway in front of her friends, she would have no choice but to ignore them. By the end of the movie, she has opened up to everyone else about her fears of letting her peers down and has formed a close relationship with Bender.

“The Story of Us” is written by Deb Caletti and is a romance adventure book. It is set in a nice, expensive country living space. Caletti wrote this book in honor and memory of her and her little family of three’s furry friend, Jupiter.

When it comes to marriage, we expect the fairy tale story that we grew up watching on tv and reading in books; stories such as Cinderella, Snow White, or Aladdin. We’re convinced that marriage will solve our problems. We have the false conception that marriage will bring us the perfect white picket fence, 2.4 kids and a nice dog; that our husband/wife will be ideal, and that we’ll live happily ever after. In the story The Sorrowful Woman by Gail Godwin; modern marriage is portrayed as the perfect fairytale that went horribly wrong. Godwin’s protagonist “The wife and mother” can be described as selfish and self-centered due to her unwillingness to conform to the fairytale that she finds herself resenting.

Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale written by Eva Schloss is an inspiring life experience of a young girl who is affected greatly by the Holocaust. Eva was a teenager that was very close to her family including; Pappy, Mutti, and Heinz. She was especially close to Heinz because he helped her through the rough times and was always their for her when she needed him. The Nazi’s started to get closer to where the Geiringer family lived, so they made the hard decision to go into hiding. Making the decision to go into hiding was hard, but when they realized that they would have a better chance of surviving if they were separated, they were completely devastated. As Mutti and Eva left Pappy and Heinz, they were worried that they might never get to see

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,

Each and every child grows up viewing Disney movies, wearing princess gowns, and buzz lightyear suits. The parents of these children are the individuals purchasing these Disney costumes, toys, candy, and other related items for their children. Our society today accepts Disney and their culture of entertainment as a part of a child’s childhood experience without second thought. Elements of the fairytale of Cinderella has adapted over time to please the culture in which it is told; yet in today’s culture, adaptation to these elements is taken to where it has never been. In “The Princess Paradox,” James Poniewozik says, “You can have the girly dream of glass slippers and true love, these films say, as well as the womanly ideal of self-determination and independence and any contradictions between them are no match for the movies’ magic” (Poniewozik 324). Peggy Orenstein compliments Poniewozik’s article because she states, “The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother” (Orenstein 327). Poniewozik is trying to argue that films have altered the story of Cinderella in the 21st century cinema realm due to the addition of the concept of feminism, women 's separation from men, and the traditional magic implemented within them. Orenstein marries these articles together indirectly by pointing out that Disney legitimately had no marketing plan, yet they continue to rake in money. The reason Disney

A natural part of life and human nature is that bonds can end due to a difference in opinion. This is the case within the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, as the American daughters of the China-born mothers grow up in perpetual disconnect because of their cultural differences. Consequently, the daughters’ view of their mother’s love is distorted. Without a clear comprehension of their mother’s love, which is shown in forms of her words and actions, the daughters are constantly haunted by life’s difficulties. Thus, The Joy Luck Club emphasizes that a bond between a mother and daughter is important because it provides an opportunity to understand a mother’s love and subsequently, allows her to overcome the difficulties of life. This is illustrated through a mother’s sacrifices providing hope, a mother’s guidance overcoming sorrow, and a mother’s wisdom protecting desires.

I read The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. The Boy Who Dared has 192 pages and was published in 2008. Susan Campbell Bartoletti writes a lot of historical fiction book for younger audiences. She has also written book about the KKK, The Great Irish Famine, the Holocaust, Child labor, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and much more. Susan also writes young children 's books such as, Nobody’s Diggier Than a Dog and Nobody’s Nosier Than a Cat. I chose The Boy Who Dared because I really enjoy learning about the holocaust. This book falls into the Historical Fiction category. The Boy Who Dared, looked really interesting because it is about a boy who spoke up against the Nazi regime during the time of the Holocaust. The book is

Fairy tales often show that it is the boys and men who are the ones allowed to go on adventures and save the day, Angela Carter changes that by making it that anyone - even girls and women, can share those same curious, adventurous, and even heroic characteristics. The term is mainly used for stories with origins in European tradition and, at least in recent centuries, mostly relates to children's literature. Fairytales have been around for a long time, starting off as oral stories later to be collected by the Grimm brothers in the early 19th century. It is normally males that would gather fairy tales; although women, especially elderly ones, were the best sources of fairy tales in many of the cultures. It is a characteristic of fairy tales

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