Summary By Octavia Butler

In the novel Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, Catherine does not enjoy her life because she can’t do what she wants or things that make her happy. She wants to be free; she feels like a wild animal locked in a cage. She does not want to be a lady, but instead to be wild and carefree like most of the boys are. Due to her courage and determination to resist all of the negative things that are forced on her, Catherine is able to overcome each obstacle that is placed in her way.

In Blah, Blah, Blah, the author Kim Kessler discusses the various uses for the phrase “blah, blah, blah”. She mentions how often she has encountered this phrase recently and how frequently people her age use it to complete a thought. The author believes the employment of this phrase can be explained through a few reasons. These reasons include a lack of interesting material in conversations and a way to get to the interesting part of the story quickly. In addition, it is a method invoked by the person speaking to save both energy and time, as well as to show that the person telling the story and the person listening share an understanding.

Clark, Emily. Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society 1727-1834. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Emily Clark’s book Masterless Mistresses addresses the Ursuline order of nuns in the Louisiana area between 1727 and 1834.

Wake, a novel by Lisa McMann is about a girl named Janie Hannagan. In this book Janie takes on an adventure through her life, introducing us to many different people in her life, such as her alcoholic mother and her best friend, Carrie and Melinda Jeffers, who doesn’t like Janie very much. At the beginning if the story we meet Janie in a Library, where she working on homework, when everything goes black and she is transferred into Luke Drakes dream. We learn that Janie has the ability to see other people’s dreams and started being able to the age of nine and continues to but as she gets older and in High School she is able to control them and help people in their embarrassing dreams. Then she meets Caleb, the school outcast.

Dana is young, intelligent, middle class writer and in interracial relationship different, almost extraordinary, for a black woman in the late '70s. This novel was to try to make people feel the past as well as understand the history of the slavery experience. Butler wanted us to be in their skin, mind emotions and to feel like we were them in the past. Dana didn’t agree with the plantation life, Dana sees how the Whites act towards the Blacks. The goal was to keep Rufus alive whenever she was pulled back in time.

“Between Shades of Gray” by Ruta Septys is a novel during WW2 about a Lithuanian girl named Lina that has been deported to a Siberian labor camp and must survive the hardships there. In this book, there were several powerful messages shown. The author put a huge emphasis on hope, courage, and love. In the end, I figured out the author suggests that you should never give up hope. When the NKVD were trying to force the people to sign a contract that will bind them to the farm for 25 years, Lina thinks, “It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart.

Catherine is a young fourteen year old girl being forced to marry her suitor. In the novel, Catherine Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman, Catherine cannot escape her everyday medieval life. She cannot escape her lady tasks, love for a bear, and her marriage to Shaggy Beard. In medieval times men thought women we too gentle.

Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, connects the past to the present through Dana and Kevin time traveling back to an era of slavery. The theme of time is essential throughout the novel, especially to Dana and Kevin’s survival and who they are as people. Both Dana and Kevin begin to comprehend that what has happened in the past is gone but never forgotten. Although slavery is no longer legal today, we are living in its ramifications. Butler emphasizes the theme that the past and the present cannot easily be distinguished and are consistently related.

By mixing a time travel genre with a historical slave narrative Butler is also able to effectively keep the reader engrossed in her story. The time travel aspect appeals to a wider audience and allows her a gateway of addressing her main point of showing off the many social and technological achievements that humanity has

As an African America, Dana is forced into the life of a slave, suffering through various hardships and numerous close encounters with death. All of these experiences have a significant effect on Dana’s mental stability, as she becomes more and more distant and distressed. However, her fellow characters are unable to fully realize Dana’s state of

“What could she do?” (Soto 3). We have all at some point or another been the victim of circumstance, whether we accept it or not. The short story “Mother and Daughter” by Gary Soto tells the story of an instance in which eighth grader, Yollie Moreno, is the victim of circumstance. Yollie is a smart, but innocent, young woman who lives with her impoverished mother.

She becomes a witness to how a vulnerable little boy turns into a selfish, malevolent and cruel slave master. In every chapter of the novel, Dana has been transported to a certain period of time and observes significant changes in the behavior of Rufus, due to the influence of the environment. Therefore, Rufus is more of a product of Nurture, rather than Nature. His father, Tom Weylin, is influential in how Rufus

Survival:Putting Trust in Others In the novel Kindred, the main story centers on the struggles and hardships the main character, Dana Franklin faces as she is stuck in the Antebellum South, a world that isn’t so accepting of her. She desperately tries to return to her own time in Los Angeles 1976. The fact that Dana is a person of color and is stuck in the Antebellum South makes her subject to cruel, bitter treatment by white slaveholders. In Kindred, Octavia Butler describes survival as putting trust in others and making decisions one might regret otherwise; Dana’s personal decisions affected not only herself but others including Rufus, Alice, and Kevin.

In “She’s Come Undone”, Dolores Price is a woman who tells her story from the age of four to the age of forty years old. She goes through many obstacles in which first include her mother’s miscarriage that left her mother wounded mentally, she would walk around like a zombie and disregard her daughter, Dolores. Since, the miscarriage her mother and father drifted apart and eventually got divorced leaving Dolores devastated and left not understanding why all this is happening. Her family then separated and she goes to live with her grandmother and mother where they soon buy a TV which starts it all. Wally Lamb the author of She’s Come Undone was born in Norwich, CT which influences the setting of the book.

Lucille Parkinson McCarthy, author of the article, “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum”, conducted an experiment that followed one student over a twenty-one month period, through three separate college classes to record his behavioral changes in response to each of the class’s differences in their writing expectations. The purpose was to provide both student and professor a better understanding of the difficulties a student faces while adjusting to the different social and academic settings of each class. McCarthy chose to enter her study without any sort of hypothesis, therefore allowing herself an opportunity to better understand how each writing assignment related to the class specifically and “what