Sarah's Key Quotes

In this section, Jeannette Walls starts off, in the present time by telling the readers about her seeing her mom on the street, that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Jeannette uses emotional words like blustering and fretted to show that seeing her mom was an emotional time. Later in the section, she goes way back into her life to when she was three years old and when her family and her was living in the desert. She started off telling a story of when she was on fire. This story was intense, it was really dramatic on her parents part, her dad was screaming at her and the doctor a lot. Then she talked about when they moved to Las Vegas, her family lived in a motel room, which didn’t last long, they had to leave Vegas in a rush, because her dad was cheating in blackjack and the dealer found out. The last story in the section is where her family drove to San Francisco and stayed in another motel. One night her dad was at the bar, across the street. He left Jeannette and her three other siblings in the room. Jeannette got bored so she decided to play with fire and that let to a big disaster resulting in the whole hotel burning down.

The mother begins to rebel against tradition by taking an active role in educating and freeing herself. Through her radio, telephone and trips out with her sons she develops her own opinions about the world, the war, and the domination and seclusion of woman. She loses her innocence as a result to her new knowledge and experience.

Jeannette Walls is shaped by the independence of her entire childhood as she learned how to create her own future and fend for herself. For example, as Rosemary Walls throws another fit about her “horrible” life, Jeannette vows that she will never end up like her own mother and that she would never feel sorry for herself (248). Jeannette is tired of having to always pick up the messes that her parents constantly

This books main character is Anna and she is faced with many obstacles while she strives to save lives and keep herself healthy at the same time. She is a housemaid and a widow that is stuck on her own trying to heal many people. The main event is the bubonic plague which turns an entire city upside down in fear, sorrow, and hatred. Anna has to deal with many different people accusing her of wrong doing to benefit herself or somebody else in letting somebody die.

Initially Jeannette Walls relied on her parents to make decisions for her. However over the course of the book her maturity transforms into self resilience. All these experiences and decisions change her over time. She starts out a young clueless and dependant person. After many lessons she ends up a realistic down to earth independent person that gives her the best life possible.

Jeannette Walls was a young girl. Moving around constantly her entire life always on an adventure. Her family never had much money, and she had a hard time finding food. She was a skinny, tall girl with red hair, pale skin, and buck teeth. She was very optimistic in every hard situation she was put in and never gave up faith in her father, for a while anyways. Her father was who she had to put all her faith into. He made the decisions and he was the one who made all these empty promises to janette and her siblings. Janette lived life to the fullest, always being positive and never complaining and to be grateful of what she had, like her parents had taught her. She rarely cried, she was tough. She tried not to care what people think, because her mother taught her that it didn't matter. She stood up for herself, and her family, even in rough times. Even if it was up against someone that isn't in her favor. Through the rough times in her

Also, her parents’ marriage had great influenced towards the amount of turbulence in her life. If her mother wasn’t jumping out of cars into the darkness after a fight or her father’s physicals abuse towards her mother after one to many drinks there was also something to add to her pleasant childhood. Writing a memoir gave a very personal incite to the struggles Jeannette’s had when growing up this making her life more reliable whereas an autobiography would have given information to much about chronological events. Writing her story as a memoir allowed Jeannette to use a less formal and more emotional approach towards telling the reader about her life, this also making it more relatable. In my opinion the story was more effective by being told as a memoir, which allowed her to share specific memories that shaped her into that person she is

The summary of the story is a memoir, which is about Jeannette and her family who are constantly low on food and money, family moving around the country a lot, and having a hard time to re-settle. The family is very dysfunctional with a multiple of stories to tell. The book is filled with much different kind of experiences that the family including Jeannette has been through together.

Throughout the novel, the readers have the ability to follow along Jeanette’s life story. She deals with her distracted yet present parents. They remind her of the important lessons in life. One of the most important lessons that Jeannette learns is that life will eventually work in the end and if it still isn't working that just means it is not the end

Some of the French say they weren’t aware of the Roundup (though living across the street from the stinking stadium), some admit to a vague awareness but “What could you do?” But some are courageous in their opposition to inhumanity. Sarah and her co-escapee find their way to the rural home of a couple with grandchildren Sarah's age, the Dufaures, who at first try to “avoid trouble” but then take them in and bravely brazen it out with the police in order to call in a physician to attend the other little girl who is, however, beyond saving. And -- since Sarah is unstoppable in her attempt to get back to her little brother -- the Dufaures accompany her to Paris, risking their own arrest, in a great train scene in which the police share their compartment and the conductor comes looking for everybody’s transit papers. And what happens when Sarah gets back to the old apartment and the locked wardrobe … ?

In the novel, Sarah appears to have everything together on the outside, but she actually is just wearing a mask to hide the disarray that is happening inside. Her trauma is encased by the guilt she is experiencing. She feels bad for not being able to predict Andrew’s death, the affair she is having with Lawrence, and the experience she has on the beach in Nigeria. Andrew hung himself because of the decision he made on the beach and Sarah realizes if she wasn’t having an affair in the first place they would have never been there. Sarah says to Little Bee “I didn’t lose Andrew, Bee.

This is the moment in the book where Sarah has given up being a child and has become an adult and is ready to take on the holocaust’s challenges, and find out what happened to her little brother, Michel. This moment in the novel is monumental because, this is the when Sirka becomes Sarah and when we readers find out who her legit name actually is. Sarah has been through so much, seen too much, and has experienced a massive amount of crulety to still be a little girl. This is a sad yet powerful moment in the book that furthers the plot and the character development in Sarah.

Unlike her father and sister Jeanette shows us that it is capable to reach your full potential regardless of what you have gone through. Even through the hardships of her childhood Jeanette is set on moving to New York with Lori and becoming a reporter. By putting her past aside she is able to achieve this and finally reaches her full potential. “I still went into the office in the city once a week, but this was where John and I lived and worked, our home—the first house I’d ever owned. Mom and Lori admired the wide planked floorboards, the big fireplaces, and the ceiling beams made from locust posts, with gouge marks from the ax that had felled them.” Unlike any of the houses she lived in as a child, her current home goes above and beyond. If you compare Jeannette to her sister Maureen it’s clear that becoming all that you can be depends solely on yourself. Maureen went through the same experiences as Jeanette, yet Jeanette is the one who decides to do something with her life, while Maureen continues to let her life be the same as it always was.

The “gentleman” decided to pay her back in a way I never would have thought he would: taking her to seduce the man he was trying to pawn so he can give her the money she needs. I mean she was almost raped! If it wasn’t for her scars she would have never gotten out of the place she was later dragged into, something her father allowed. I almost ripped my book apart really; I could literally feel my blood boiling at that animal. My frustration due to the injustice of Jeannette getting underpaid at Becker’s Jewelry Box was nothing compared to this. It was especially nothing to what I felt when I saw Jeannette stand up to her nightmare of a mother for not working and getting hit by her father for it. I know she was furious, that was the moment Jeannette did start saving up to escape Welch before graduation, but in my opinion that is not enough. I couldn’t and can’t believe her. She should have been out for blood, not for escape. I know what it’s like, to suffer in embarrassment after an event like that, but if I was ever in a situation worse than I have been I wouldn’t even be stuck in a situation like hers. I don’t think I would have even tried to tough it out with the savages she’s lived with for so many years. I would have left as soon as I could think for myself, I would have never

The resentment within the young girl’s family is essential to the novel because one can understand the young girl better as she makes her decision.