Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Throughout this semester, I completed reading four books from the strand Minority Literature. The reasons behind choosing this particular strand was because I wanted new insights on different ethnicity groups and some sounded intriguing just by looking at the titles. The four books I read this semester were Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Absolute True Diary of a Part-time Indian, The House on Mango Street, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. All the characters in the stories were unique in their own ways of how they approached numerous events in their lives. The main themes of all these four books were identity and race.
The first book I read was Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry by Mildred T. Taylor. Many people are probably …show more content…
Living in a rural city of Southern Mississippi, Cassie Logan and her family constantly struggled living their lives where blacks and white were segregated. The topics/themes of racism and injustice impacted this novel for several reasons. Although now we live in a world where we thrive to live in an equal society, years before, it was a whole different story. With Jim Crow laws in action, it was nearly impossible to imagine blacks and whites being considered the same. Society was ran as if whites dominated black …show more content…
Like the previous book I mentioned before, this book had a rich, cultural background. The main theme of this book were dreams and hopes for a better future. Esperanza, the main character in the story moved to an apartment on Mango street, an improvement of the previous places she lived before, but still works to be done. She said in the book, “They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. […] Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed.” In reality, her family lived in poverty, a small, red house about to fall apart Embarrassed by the appearance of her house, Esperanza quickly wished that the “dream” house became a reality soon. Throughout the book, there were many struggles ahead of Esperanza that she was not yet aware of. She faced struggles of a man who forced her to kiss him or some boys who tried to rape her. Other examples were when she found out that her friend had an abusive parent. Esperanza quickly learned that she was still young to explore the big world on her own. In the end however, Esperanza said that she was mentally and physically ready to leave the shabby, red house and may