The Darkest Child post #3

Even though on some occasions the Quinn siblings seem bitter towards each other there are still times when they display some type of compassion/care for each other. For example, Tangy Mae is very protective of her older sister Martha Jean who is deaf. Their mother refers to Martha Jean as the "dummy" but Tangy Mae tries to take care of her. When they were at the post office a twenty year old young man was very attracted to Martha Jean but Tangy Mae tried her best to not let him talk to her because she new it was risking her sister's safety. 

Tangy Mae's older brothers were involved in civil rights, making sure that the black people in their town are being treated equally as the whites because they were living in the time of segregation. I do not think their mother really paid much attention to the unequal treatment of blacks, or maybe she did but did not pay attention to making any actions that would change it, she seemed comfortable in the fact that blacks were considered inferior to whites. It seems like Rozelle lived in her own world.  

The Darkest Child post #2

Tangy Mae and her siblings find out that their mother is having another child and because she was ill from the pregnancy, she tried  to make it seem as if she was going to die so that people would sympathize with them and give them food or money. Unfortunately her secret was discovered and turned out she was hiding her pregnancy from her kids also. In this chunk Tangy Mae describes when she was being made fun of by some other children and she ran away. When Rozelle found out she took Tangy Mae and branded her ordering her, as a Quinn, to never run from anyone again. 

The Quinn children were pretty much left to raise themselves, especially during the time of their mother's tenth pregnancy. They all, especially the younger ones, have a very twisted view of life and it s probably a result a result of the absence of adequate parental figures in their lives. They also do not have the best relationships with each other, for example Tarabelle and Tangy Mae have lots of arguments; Tarabelle is rude to Tangy Mae because she has been in school longer than anyone else and Tangy Mae feels that Tarabelle does not do enough work around the house. It is as if their mother's bitterness has rubbed off on her children.

The Darkest Child post #1

Tangy Mae is one of 9 children by Rozelle Quinn. She is one of the youngest and her mother categorizes her and her siblings according to their skin color; the lighter-skinned ones are her favorites. The Quinn family lives in the south during segregation so even though they are seen differently by their mother at home, outside of the house they are all seen as negroes and treated like negroes. Their mother has an interesting way of raising her children. She treats them as her servants, making them work to support their family and limiting the amount of education they get. Rozelle Quinn's treatment of her children is completely void of compassion and love. It seems like she feels her children are only useful for making money for the family. Maybe it is because there is not a father figure in the Quinn home and so Rozelle feels that making her children work is the only way their family can survive, but she still does not treat her children like a mother should; she calls them degrading names and does things to them to make them really scared of her.

Stephen Chbosky's  The Perks Of Being A Wallflower  is an outstanding novel about the awkward times of adolescence and explores many themes. Chbosky implicitly expresses the importance of remaining true to oneself as a youth. Two of the main themes were Conformity and appearance vs. reality, the characters in the book had difficulty being open about their true-selves because the were already portrayed as something different. These characters failed to realize that being true could have benefitted them. While reading this book, I could not put it down; I really enjoyed it because it had a lot of topics that I could relate to as a teenager such as identity issues, fitting in, conformity, and peer pressure.

How do you think a person's being honest about their identity, even though it may hurt their reputation, can be beneficial?