New Semester- New Start!

Welcome back to my blog for the 3rd quarter! We are still finishing A Midsummer's Night Dream, but we will be reading a true story called Into the Wild soon! I have learned about John Carroll that your grades matter here and that you can't slack off like in middle school. Your responsible for getting your homework and if you don't have it for class, than its your fault. I haven't really learned anything new about myself. I've stayed the exact same since middle school. Even though I try really hard, for the second quarter, I think I have to try a lot harder to get the grades I want. I haven't really changed since September, I don't think. I have definately made a lot of friends though.

Character Sketch Essay

Character Sketch: Haven

That Summer by Sarah Dessen

In the book That Summer by Sarah Dessen, Haven, an average teenage girl, has to deal with her dad’s infidelity resulting in the divorce of her parents. Haven is very serious with little humor. She cares about other people more than she does about herself and she likes to be in control. She doesn’t like changes but she tries to change what happens with her parents. Despite her efforts, Haven’s parents get divorced and then her dad gets re-married to a woman she and her sister don’t like.

 Haven and her sister, Ashley don’t like their dad’s girlfriend, Lorna. Haven’s father Mac works on a local news station. It is there that he meets Lorna. “Lorna Queen, of ‘Lorna Queen’s Weather Scene” on WTSB News Channel 5. She was what they called a meteorologist and what my mother called the weather pet, but only when she was feeling vindictive. Lorna was blonde and perky an wore cute little pastel suits that showed just enough leg as she stood smiling in front of colorful maps, sweeping her arm as if she controlled all the elements (Dessen12).” Haven and Ashley thought that her parent’s relationship would never end, especially Ashley who was always daddy’s little girl. “My mother had read all the books about divorce and tried hard to make it smooth for me and my sister, Ashley, who was Daddy’s pet and left the room at even the slightest remark about his hair. My mother kept her outbursts about that to a minimum, but I could tell by the way she winced when they showed my father and Lorna together at their subordinate news desk that it still hurt. Before the divorce my mother had been good at outbursts, and this quietness, this holding back, was more unnerving than I imagined any breakdown could be (Dessen12).”

Despite what anyone in the family says, Haven and Ashley’s dad plans to get married to Lorna. Haven begins to think that her dad doesn’t care about her, her sister or her mom anymore but yet she still goes to the wedding because she and her sister were asked to be bridesmaids. "Now the church was packed and the aisle seemed about a hundred miles long with the minister standing at the end of it like a tiny plastic figure you might slap onto a cake (Dessen21)." While they were standing in line getting ready to go down the aisle Lorna tells them that she loves them. She then realizes that everything’s final and there’s no going back. Things were changed forever. "My sister started crying and I knew it wasn't for the happiness of weddings but for the finality of all of this, knowing that things would never go back to the way they were (Dessen23).”

By the end of this book Haven and her sister Ashley mature a lot. Haven realizes that she can’t change what happened in the past. Only she can control what happens to her in the future and no one can change her. "I wondered if the summer had changed me, if with one look the world could see a difference (Dessen97).” She learns that you can’t always care what people say about you and you just have to learn to move on. “Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine (Dessen11).”

 This character's transformation is teaching the reader that you can't always control what happens and not everything is your fault. The author is trying to say just to hold on and everything will get better.  A lot can be learned from Haven. You can learn to persevere through everything and to trust other people because sometimes they know better than you do. Haven realizes that through her parents’ divorce and her sister’s marriage that everything happens for a reason. If everything stayed the same, you would never change and learn to grow up and adapt to new ideas and things.