Avid Reader's Musings: Mississippi

Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

by Mildred D. Taylor

★★★★★

This book! I just loved it. Through the eyes of a young African American girl named Cassie Logan we see the mounting racial tensions in a small Mississippi community in the 1930s. With her brothers, parents, and grandmother, she lives on a small farm that her family has owned for years.

I love the richness and diversely of the characters throughout the book. We see things from Cassie's point of view but we get to meet Jeremy, a young white boy who loves the Logan family and just wants to be part of it. We see his sister, who is naïve about her actions, a clear product of the prejudiced world in which she was raised. We see Cassie’s hothead Uncle Hammer and the damage that his attitude can have by escalating an already terrible state. We see the hopelessness of the sharecropper’s plight as they try to fight peaceably against the discrimination they are facing. We see Mr. Jamison who tries to stand up for them against the fellow white neighbors and we see the risk he’s willing to take. Each person plays their part, however small, in the fight against injustice.

The characters of T.J. and Stacey were particularly powerful. Stacey is in the midst of becoming a man and must learn how to deal with the anger and frustration he feels. T.J. is making the wrong decisions in life, but you’re left hoping he learns his lesson before it’s too late. I also loved the strength and courage of Cassie’s mother. She raises her children to have self-respect and quietly stands her ground as a teacher in the local school.

I can't believe I missed this book when I was younger. Although I went back and found a copy of another book that I loved when I was in grade school, called “Mississippi Bridge” and realize that not only is it by the same author, it's about the same characters!

I feel like this book would perfectly as a companion piece with To Kill a Mockingbird. It deals with the same issues in a similar time frame, but shows them from the opposite culture’s point of view. Cassie’s experience mirrors Scout’s, while Stacey’s mirrors Jem’s. The contrasting experiences would provide a great opportunity to give the issue more depth for students.

BOTTOM LINE: I loved it. The wonderfully written, diverse characters were empathetic and complex and made the book a must for my young adult keeper shelf in my library.

The Optimist's Daughter

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Posted by Melissa (Avid Reader)

The Optimist's Daughter

by Eudora Welty

★★★★

Our title character, Laurel, is a young widowed woman who returns home to Mississippi when her father becomes ill. Soon she finds herself reeling after his death and she must grieve while trying to deal with her acerbic step-mother Fay.

The descriptions of Laurel’s time in her hometown felt so real to me. I remember going through the motions of regular life while being wracked with grief. I could feel her frustration as she has to listen to old biddies gossip and prattle on with their exaggerated stories when all she wants is to be alone with her pain. The plot never became melodramatic; instead Laurel calmly suffers through the indignities of dealing with unbearable neighbors and old friends. She keeps her thoughts to herself, processing things in her own quiet way.

One thing that really rang true for me was Laurel’s struggle between what she knew of her father and what people were saying about him. People’s memories of the deceased are often contradictory. They are tainted with our own opinions and experiences. Laurel’s know this, but it’s still painful to hear people wax poetic about her father in a way that doesn’t ring true.

“What’s happening isn’t real,” Laurel said, low.

“The ending of a man’s life on earth is very real indeed,” Miss Adele said.

“But what people are saying.”

Fay is a character that’s easy to dislike, but when I dig a bit deeper I can’t help but pity her. She marries up in her mind and her new husband provides an escape from the family and life she despises. Now he’s gone and she’s bitter and angry. She can’t help but feel abandoned and she’s taking the pain out on everyone around her.

BOTTOM LINE: This is the first work of Welty’s I have ever read, but it won’t be the last. Her writing invokes Laurel’s claustrophobic angst so easily, I felt like I was right there with her.

“For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.”

“She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams."