1- The heart breaking chapter! I can see and feel Jeanette’s pain even though I dont think she realized it yet. She was experiencing deep heart breaking situations, while her best friend Elsie was in the hospital, her mom builds a strong emotional disconnection, the fact that she is adopted is finally officially confirmed and she has such a strong disconnection with her adopted mom. And worse, the only thing that makes her to feel good and valued is her relationship with Melanie, that in this level of the book I can assumpt she already knows it is a sin. What makes me most happy is that in any of these moments she seems rebellious, and I can imagine that what she was living was not easy. Later in the chapter the whole church wants her to repent from having the relationship with Melanie, and she does not understand the reason of being mocked so hardly. Even in her repentance, the pastor still wants her to skip school, and in their lenses it would be the right thing to do. I am still amazed by the writers talent of describing factual absurd situations without sounding hardly opnative, and it makes me feel her side of the story even more. I still feel some sense of care in the church’s side, because even though a member of the church would be doing something very sinful, they were still following biblical protocols the way they could. In all moments I see them giving her new chances and in any point deleting ties with her, while in Jeanette’s side the whole problem is more about her family’s relationships and her construction of identity and independency.

2 – Jeanette is learning that there is an emotional disconnection between her and her mom. Jeanette’s natural mom look for her. She knocks on the door, but she does not know who is the person on the other side of the door. But she finds it weird who mom does not ask the person to do away, as usual. Instead, she lets the person to come in, there are some yelling and the person goes away. Jeanette, already attuned to her mom’s sense of disonestity, does not wait to see what happened. She gets an away to hear the conversation, and realizes that the unexpected guest is her natural mom. She is starts crying, and her mom tells the woman went away. “I know who she is, why did you now tell me?’ ‘It is nothing to do with you.’ ‘She is my mother.'” After this dialogue, she continues describing the scene that her mom hit her after she said that the woman who came is her mother: “No sooner had I said that than I felt a blow that wrapped roung my head like a bandage.” This scene shows the disconnection between emotions and communication between her adoptive mom and herself, being twisted with violence. Jeanette starts learning that she can not talk with her mom, but also, even the deepest emotional side of her could not be trusted with her mom, otherwise she could be hit again. Her mom goes away to the kitchen, showing again the emotional distance that were built up. This scene explains much of the reasons Jeanette would feel so comfortable with Melanie, where she had the right to be heard and understood. Even though in many other chapters Melanie would not be so reciprocal to Jeanette’s tries of approximation due to its sinful nature, in Jeanette’s point of view is that she is seeking for love and comfort, in the way she found it.