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.

A window inside of me.

I was home schooled so I don't exactly remember how I learned to read but somewhere in my childhood I learned. I can still remember my mom buying Macy books, adventures of a mouse and her friends. She would read them with me, helping me sound out the words along the way; afterwards we would lie on our stomachs and color on the glossy cardboard pages. She later introduced me to the Boxcar Children series and The Mouse with the Motorcycle series. Although both of the series fascinated me I never quite understood emotion until I read this one particular book in fourth grade. I don't quite remember the name or the story line, but I do know that a little boy drowned in a creek. I had never been so scared in my life. When I started seventh grade I started reading Harry Potter and I craved those books, I couldn’t put them down, I would read at home in a corner of my room getting comfortable enough to sit for hours. I later read the Twilight series, yes the movies are horrible but I fell for the books, the characters; they were real to me. Then stepping stones in my life began to change and I moved, through the move I met an amazing librarian who introduced Stephen King, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Mitchell, Jane Austin and Edgar Allan Poe to me. I absorbed every emotion the character felt, I even imagined my life as theirs. Books had become a reality to me an escape into a life that either made me hate mine or be thankful for it. I now read because I love to, sometimes I start reading a book and won't finish it for months, but I love to take my time, breath in between pages. It is a chance for me to be someone I'm not, to see the world  through someone else's eyes. Reading has immensely helped me to become a more broadened person; to see lives and memories of authors within a collage of words and jumbled letters.