A hole into reality.

"And now, do you ever dangle your toes over precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home.”(Hopkins 2). Burned by Ellen Hopkins is a novel about a Mormon girl raised to follow instructions of men. Pattyn Von Stratten listens to her mothers screams while she sleeps, only to be deceived with silence that echoes her pain. Pattyn  is sixteen, with beauty that stands out to most people, even the “popular” crowd. She is one out of six girls that all share a father who drinks, is abusive, and has a tendency to talk to ghosts. “…if he truly believes he and god are brothers, meant to live together in the Great Beyond, can’t he ask for a hand, a way to silence his ghosts, without Johnnie WB?” (Hopkins 40-41). I often feel like a character in a novel, trapped within its poison pages. Burned has captured my every thought with a bitter taste of reality. Pattyn, deprived of reality, feels as if her bubble of fumes is a better realism than one of love and equality. My reality hit me when I realized there were people like her everywhere; raised to be a certain way, never to learn the true meaning of life. The bitterness in Burned gives me goose bumps, often leaving me with the feeling of repugnance. Burned is seeping with the ignorance of a girl who has yet to realize her world is what she makes of it.