Tag Archives: BlogPost1

Life in Puerto Rico

On pages 1-62, Jaquira branches out into many different topics and events in her life. The main stage in her life that she spoke about in this section was her childhood in Puerto Rico. From the way she described it, it was like the calm before the storm. The “storm”, which could be her growing up and facing even tougher challenges. Life in Puerto Rico was not perfect, but as she describes seems better than what she hints will happen to her in the future. She knew her homeland was still dangerous and her family wasn’t perfect, but she acknowledges that even with all the bad, there were still things she appreciated about her experience there. It reminded me of how people often hang onto the past and their childhood because they were still naive and unaware of what’s to come when they grow up. 

Something that really stood out to me was how the setting really plays a role in how Jaquira tells her story in this section. With Puerto Rico, you can easily associate the place with positive emotions and words because of her experience there. The words she uses to describe her surroundings and how she felt there can help you draw the conclusion that she was happier in an area she already knows. She often talks about her days playing as a kid in the sun with her childhood friends. Often bringing up the “warm” and “sunny” days spent doing what she enjoyed revealed what Puerto Rico meant to her. As for Miami, she describes the conditions she lived in as “…the kind of poor you could feel in your bones, in your teeth, in your stomach” (pg. 61) and also mentions what’s to show up in the next section of the book.

(1st Blog Post for Ordinary Girls)

Heavy Part One: Grandma’s Duty

In part one of the book Heavy, there is a section called Be. In this section Laymon encounters a Mumford boy. The boy offers Kiese to shoot squirrels with him but Kiese tells him how he’s not allowed to shoot. After Kiese told his grandma about what the Mumford boy had told him she said to him “These white folk, they liable to have us locked up under the jail Kie.”(Laymon 52). This is a significant part in the book because his grandma explains the power of the Mumford’s and other people like them. This helps Kiese understand what place he’s in and how he could be seen by these people which is nothing more than a threat. He leads on by talking about stealing their food and he has to be reminded of why he can’t do that. This part of the section caught my eye because it was the first piece of writing I had read by Laymon in the beginning of the year which gravitated me towards reading Heavy.