Rooming with Independent Reading

I've noticed while reading the text my feelings towards characters tend to flip... a lot. Because Matt Desmond focuses on both the landlord and tenant perspectives I can see the pros and cons of each side. To set some perspective, you must know that Sherrena Tarver is a landlord in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Arleen is one of her many tenants. Arleen rents in one of Sherrena’s building until the amount of money she owes (over $11,000) leads her to an eviction notice from Sherrena. Each eviction is taken to court. Some tenants show up and fight, some show up and accept their fate, and some do not even bother to come. Arleen showed up at the courthouse ready to accept the sentence that would shove her and her children, Jori and Jafaris, back onto the streets. My favorite passage that I have read so far is “When Sherrena and Arleen walked out of the courthouse, a gentle snow was falling. Sherrena had agreed to give Arleen a ride home. In the car, Sherrena paused to rub her neck, and A...

Out of the eight story lines that I have followed in Evicted, Scott's has impacted me in a way different from the others. For many of the tenants that I've followed, the life that they live was in some way not their fault. They were abused by boyfriends, their parents brought them into poverty, or they had a child who they struggled to support. I feel for all of them, in the sense that things that I do not even need to think about are struggles for them to obtain. Scott didn't start out in poverty. He was a well educated, kind, and respected nurse. Like Lamar, Scott fell into trouble through drugs... something that terrifies me a lot. Lamar was a soldier in the navy, and when he returned from war his demands were not met. He turned to drugs, which eventually led him to crack. Lamar was able to get clean and provide a somewhat normal life for his children, but Scott's journey was quite different. Scott, as he says, always had a knack for caring for elderly peop...

So... here we go again. Another book, four more mini-blogs, and two more major blogs. But this time it's nonfiction... which I'm less than thrilled for. While trying to find a nonfiction book for this assignment I was less than ecstatic. I searched up "Pulitzer prize winners nonfiction" in Google and let my sorrows come sweeping in. The first book that I saw was Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize so I figured... sure, why not? I've never been a fan of nonfiction. Growing up I was an avid reader, devouring page after page, chapter after chapter, and book after book. These books were all different, of course, but they had one similarity. Fiction. They were ALL fiction. I always figured that I had to learn about nonfiction things in school, so I might as well enjoy fantasy in my spare time. My teachers were concerned, so they told my mom I needed to broaden my horizons. My response: So, when I pic...

(Open this image in a new tab to view it close up) Emma Donoghue herself admits that one of the biggest challenges she faced while writing was the contrast between light and dark themes. Personally, I think she did a fantastic job, but it must be recognized what the purpose of these themes were. These 7 scenes/events in the book stand out to me, as each shows either an important aspect of the characters, or highlights an issue that the characters are facing.  Light: Jack's happiness with a string of eggshells show that living in a "bubble" like Room is beneficial for his mind; teaching him to be grateful for the littlest of things. Jack's escape from Room allowed him to unlock his life's greatest potential and opened up his horizons drastically . Meeting his relatives, like his Grandmother, Steppa, Grandpa, Aunt, Uncle, and cousin helped Jack find a connection to the "Outside" that lessened the pull of his want for Room. When Jack and Ma get...

Emma Donoghue, the Author One thing I was surprised and a little sad to find out was that Emma Donoghue based Room  off of real events. In 2008 a woman named Elisabeth Fritzl and her children escaped from an Austrian dungeon. She had been held captive for over 20 years by her father, who physically assaulted, sexually assaulted, and raped her numerous times during her captivity. Elisabeth Fritzl Donoghue was curious about how Fritzl must have mothered under captivity, and how she must have dealt with a mother and child bond that felt like being trapped. Donoghue recognizes that she could have ended that book after Ma and Jack escaped, but she "...decided to write something much more peculiar. A fiction so unstable in genre - sliding between fairy tale and naturalism, domestic comedy and the gothic, social satire and philosophical inquiry..." (Donoghue, 2014). Although a case like Jack's has never existed, Donoghue used the resources around her to create a pl...

In the following passage Jack, the main character, is describing the outside world that he is seeing for the first time. "Another light is whizzing by over. Things sliding in the sky that I think they’re trees. And houses and lights on giant poles and some cars everything zooming. It's like a cartoon I'm inside but messier. I'm holding on to the edge of the truck, it's all hard and cold. The sky is the most enormous, over there's a pink orange bit but the rest is gray. When I look down, the street is black and a long long way. I know to jump good but not when everything's roaring and bumping and the lights all blurry and the air so strange smells like apple or something. My eyes aren't working right, I'm too scared to be scave" (Donoghue, 139-140). How does this shape meaning and influence understanding? Jack is only a five year old boy, so I thought his description of the things may be warped by what he does not understand. I ...