Literary Log Letter on Character

November 4, 2007

Dear Seventh Graders,

I enjoyed reading the stick incident and more (the author wrote the title in lower case letters) with you on Friday. When I read it to myself at home, I didn’t realize how long it is. I particularly like Cheryl Peck’s sense of humor. Her sense of exaggeration does remind me of how I often felt as a child; incidents seemed so much bigger to me then. Adults often minimize how big things feel to children and the author really captured that childhood reality.
We discovered a great deal about her character through reading the memoir. One personality quality we agreed on was that she was very dramatic. For example, in her retelling of the stick incident, she relates the following to her friends, “My own father HIT ME WITH A STICK! I disowned him on the spot, there was no doubt about it----I would hate him forever.” Another example of her dramatic exaggeration was when she was describing how her mother “boiled” her children. “Moss grew on our sheets. The Wee One grew tiny slits in her nect, just behind her jaws, and as a teenager she could swim two or three miles underwater before needing to come up for air.”
We also decided she was accident-prone. “I had been walking through the gravel pit…when a stone leaped up and tripped me and I fell down and jabbed my own knife into my free hand.” There were numerous other accidents which she hilariously retold through the memoir.
I enjoyed her nosiness the most, perhaps because I can remember so well how much I wanted to know about everything that happened in my house, especially if I thought I wasn’t supposed to know it. “I could not huddle over my spy register, where I could see better and hear perhaps more clearly, because sooner or later someone would murmur something about the comparative size of the ears on my mother’s pitcher collection…..”.
The one aspect of her character that we didn’t learn anything about was any physical characteristics. I wonder what she looked like. I could picture a little girl hopping home with a nail sticking out of her foot, but I couldn’t picture hair or skin color, her size, or anything else physical. Other than that, I feel like I know quite a bit about Cheryl and would like to read more.


Sincerely,

Elena