Preview

Book Review: Across A Hundred Mountains By Reyna Grande

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
400 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Book Review: Across A Hundred Mountains By Reyna Grande
Baloisa Martinez
Professor Doyen
English B50 MW 8:00-10:00
October 6, 2014
Across A Hundred Mountains Living in a poverty stricken area doesn’t have a lot to offer when one has a family to care for. Juana a young girl and her family in the book “Across a Hundred Mountains” by Reyna Grande endure many heartaches and suffering throughout the novel due to death, departure, and numerous complications. Grande uses several literary devices in her book to demonstrate what Juana and her family experienced their lifetime. The path to becoming who a person is can be a long and difficult journey that we must find on our own. For Juana she is forced to discover who she is at a very young age by witnessing her younger sisters’ passing, and her father

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Josie Mendez-Negrete’s novel, Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed, is a very disturbing tale about brutal domestic abuse and incest. Negrete’s novel is an autobiography regarding experiences of incest in a working-class Mexican American family. It is Josie Mendez-Negrete’s story of how she, her siblings, and her mother survived years of violence and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. “Las Hijas de Juan" is told chronologically, from the time Mendez-Negrete was a child until she was a young adult trying, along with the rest of her family, to come to terms with her father 's brutal legacy. It is a upsetting story of abuse and shame compounded by cultural and linguistic isolation and a system of patriarchy that devalues the experiences of women and girls. At the same time, "Las Hijas de Juan" is an inspirational tale, filled with strong women and hard-won solace found in traditional Mexican cooking, songs, and storytelling.…

    • 1851 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Speak Data Sheet

    • 1608 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Summary & Theme: The book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is about an incoming freshman named Melinda Sordino. She’s riding the bus to school but she doesn’t have any friends to sit with. While she’s looking over the crowd of kids on the bus she spots her ex best friend, Rachel, but even she mouths “I hate you.” After Melinda attends her first few classes she already hates high school. When she gets to Art class she is assigned a subject that she must turn into art for the rest of the year. Melinda receives the word “Tree” and doesn’t understand how to make that creative. She asked to switch but her teacher wouldn’t let her. Later on, she meets a girl named Heather in one of her classes, although they are completely different people, they start to hang out. Heather really wants to become popular and would like Melinda to help her. She couldn’t care less about popularity but continues to nod and agree with Heather. A couple weeks later, she discovers an old janitor closet that no one uses; she decides to make this her hideaway. She decorates it to her liking and sits in it when she needs some space. Due to Heather’s plot for popularity, Melinda finds herself caught up in helping her impress “The Marthas”, a clique Heather wants to become a part of. Soon enough, Heather tells Melinda that they can’t be friends anymore because they are too different and that she is really weird and depressed. For the first time, she actually wants to be friends with Heather; for Heather is the closest she has to a friend. Melinda starts to skip school more and more and her grades slip. Her parents are angry and disappointed, so they have a meeting with the principal. They try to get her to speak up about why she is acting out but she just stays silent. Her punishment is in school suspension; Andy Evans is there with her. All the memories from an incident in summer…

    • 1608 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In a canadian forest, Pierre and Estelle are two children that lost their parents at a very young age during spring time. During summer, they left to live with their grandmother. Their grandmother was very poor and had to work very hard to feed herself and the kids at the same time but the kids were happy with her.…

    • 59 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Eva’s father abandoned her mother and five children, forcing them to live on their own in a single-roomed brick house. Eva’s family was poor. The only thing their family had was a sewing machine which Juana slaved over day and night. Her children would try to get her to stop sewing, but she would respond by saying “I do not have time to stop.”…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The novel is structured into different parts of Vine’s life that support major themes with each section. When Vine is a child the reader will recognize the innocence of life in the eyes of a young teenage girl as she falls in love with a man she hardly knows even after they get married. Confluence represents the freedom of life that we as people all experience at a young age, but for Vine these experiences come from the rituals of her people, the Cherokee Indians. Vine’s naïve nature foreshadows to the reader Vine’s future real world problems and inexperience of responsibility and motherhood. The second sections, On The Mountain, entails the experiences that Vine goes through in life, i.e. motherhood, responsibilities, all without the presence of men. The last section, The Promise of Joy, is ironic as well as hopeful. This section contains the climax of the story which, as the reader finds, is not joyous at all. Vine comes to realize that things aren’t as bad as they seem…

    • 692 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    She describes how early her parents began a circular migration between Chicago and Mexico City. Cisneros’ father was from Mexico, so she moved frequently during her childhood. Cisneros was “ the only daughter” in a family of seven children. In these circumstances, she used to spend a lot of time by herself because she didn’t have friends and her brothers didn’t want to play with “girls”. Consequently, Cisneros felt alone and displaced. She began to read extensively finding comfort in books. Cofer describes how her father and brothers attempted to make her assume a traditional female role because Mexican women are stereotyped as housewives. She went to college only because her father thought it was a good place to look for a husband. Even though she finished college, she didn’t find a husband and her father thought it was a waste of time. Cisneros’ father treats her differently from the sons. Since she remembers, her father always forgot to mention the only daughter that he had. He used to say, “I have seven sons”. Cisneros felt ignored and rejected by her father. She always wanted the recognition and appreciation of his father. She wrote thinking of her father all the time. Finally when Cisneros’ book was translated into Spanish, she showed to her father. He enjoyed it and asked her, if she can get more copies for the family. She remembers how this day changed her life forever because her father for first time was proud of his…

    • 871 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The biggest decision people make is deciding who they are. In the story The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, the author creates a conflict of Esperanza’s internal struggle to find her identity, reminding us that the decision of who you are can be life or death. We first learn about this conflict when Esperanza is talking about her name, and how it doesn’t present her as who she is. Throughout the story, Esperanza realizes that people judge her due to the fact that she only shows them the negative aspects of her life. She isn’t being herself and showing people the kind, sweet person she is underneath. As a result of her trouble with identity, Esperanza distances herself from people.…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The novel Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande is a story about two young girls and their struggling journey to find happiness between two conflicting and distinct worlds: the United States and Mexico. Juana on one side wants to get to the United States, or “el otro lado” as mentioned in the novel, to find her father who abandoned her and her mother after leaving to find work in the US. On the other hand Adelina escapes from her house in California to follow her lover to Mexico. The girls form a bond in the most unexpected of places, a Tijuana jail, and quickly form a friendship that will connect them for the rest of their lives.…

    • 899 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    My overall opinion of the story is that it was a very interesting piece on racial inequality, economic oppression, and naturalism. The main character Dave faces all some of the issues stated and deals with them in his own way. He felt powerless in his life, where as an indentured servant working in the fields, he had to be ridiculed by not only his master, but other people and his own parents. He buys a gun to be manlier and have more control over the people round him. This is a power he isn’t ready for and he ends up “accidently” shooting one of the mules. In a sense this mule is himself, as he mentions once in the story, so in a way I feel as though he meant to do that. He ends up being forced to take on more responsibility, but ultimately…

    • 157 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    On a crisp night in Boston, all seemed well as Diane enjoyed a nice meal with her family, and the next day, her mom, dad, and brother were stolen by US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and she was stranded. The book In the Country We Love: My Family Divided, tells us the life story of Diane Guerrero, a Colombian girl who was born in the United States, unlike her parents and brother who were both born in Colombia. The author tells a heartbreaking story of a girl’s resilience in frightening situations, like isolation and poverty. Diane’s home life was turned upside down, but despite the countless number of nightmarish situations, Diane strived and pursued her dreams with no aid…

    • 757 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    A young girl, bent over a crate of potatoes, her red and swollen hands working at the potato eyes; a young Chinese farmer working his precious land under the copper sun, his back glistening with perspiration, imagining the great prosperity his work would bring him. One may envision these scenes while reading Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. In these two novels, the protagonists of each are largely affected by the social expectations of their respective communities. Esperanza Ortega, a young Mexican girl on the brink of her teenage years, has been brought up in the best of all conditions, in the most comfortable of all settings, receiving a superb education from a sophisticated private school among the daughters of other wealthy and educated land-owners, and living like a princess. Suddenly, she and her mother are forced into abject poverty with the death her father in 1930, as her greedy half-uncles strives to make life thoroughly difficult for them, burning down the Ortega house and vineyard. Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer, was born into a poor family; he has been helping to work his family’s land ever since he was old enough to guide the ox and donkey. All his life, he has worked steadily, saving bits of money from harvests; this saving of bits of money eventually made Wang Lung one of the richest men of his area. The two novels Esperanza Rising and The Good Earth, social expectations and caste affects the lives of the main characters in the form of social mobility, living conditions, and parent-child relationships within the household.…

    • 2370 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Esmeralda Santiago, Negi, had no idea how hard her childhood would be. With constant moving around and the nonstop bickering of her parents, it was tough for Negi to find her identity. A move to the big city changed her life forever. The author of When I was Puerto Rican writes about finally finding her identity.…

    • 731 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Analysis of Barefoot Heart

    • 1879 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Hart draws a childhood picture of endurance, inconsistency, and wants on many levels as well as the struggle to escape and the compulsion to remain in her migrant society. Elva had to struggle with living in the different societies as her family travelled each year to Minnesota from Texas so the adults and older children could work in the beet fields as manual laborers. Elva also didn’t have the sense of belonging or the security of her siblings of belonging to that community of the other families working together in the fields. Her father (Apa) did require that his family return early each year to Pearsall, Texas so his children could receive a proper education. He was very adamant about all of his kids graduating from school. In her own family, she had a sense of isolation since she was the youngest child and was unable to work the fields; she could only stay on the sidelines and watch. The first summer, Elva and her sister were separated from their family and had to live in a place supervised by nuns. The following summers while on the side of the fields watching for Apa’s signal to bring them water, she passed most of her time in virtual solitude. Elva remembers her birthday being celebrated only once during her…

    • 1879 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Resumen Ever After

    • 772 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Esta es la historia de Danielle De Barbarac, una joven de la edad media, que posee una fascinante mezcla de fuerza, cultura, belleza y sobrado encanto. Quien quedó huérfana de madre a muy tierna edad, lo que la acerco mucho a su padre, que era también su mejor amigo; con él compartía el amor por la lectura y su manera de ver la vida, ya que le enseño que podía ser lo que quisiera, lo que no era muy común en esa época en la que las mujeres eran relegadas a segundo plano. Su padre viajaba mucho, y en uno de sus viajes regresó con una nueva mamá para ella, lo que la ponía muy contenta, pues siempre anhelo tener una. Su madrastra era la Baronesa Rodmilla De Ghent y con ella venían sus dos hijas: Marguerite y Jaqueline De Guent, Danielle estaba muy feliz con su llegada y ansiaba por fin tener una gran familia. En este regreso, su padre le dio su último y más amado regalo, el libro Utopía de Santo Tomás Moro, el cual logro saberse de principio a fin. Está vez también fue la última vez que vio a su padre, ya que al salir a un nuevo viaje, él sufrió un paro cardiaco en la puerta de su casa, ella al ver esto corrió a ayudarlo, seguida de la baronesa; quien no pudo soportar que las últimas palabras de su esposo (Te amo), hayan sido para su pequeña hija Danielle de 8 años y no para ella. Al cuidado de su madrastra Danielle crece siendo una sirvienta más, cuya única diversión es leer sus libros favoritos junto a la chimenea, lo que no impide que el príncipe Henry de Francia, un joven rebelde, que no quiere llegar a ser rey, se enamore de ella. Henry, un joven apuesto, quien será obligado a casarse por el bien de su reino, fija sus ojos en Danielle, cuando ella intercede por uno de sus sirvientas, que era como su familia, que fue vendido por su madrastra para solventar su…

    • 772 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    * Developed his passion for aviation after watching his neighbor Louis Bleriot who was a pioneer in the field.…

    • 1339 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays