Third Blog

Well I can’t really say that much about the third part of the book I read. Because I was reading it so could just finish up with the book and be done with it. But towards the end of the book, I still had the same mind about it as I did in the beginning. It might be interesting to read, but I did not like all the swearing. There was just a lot of swearing and it just ruined the whole book for me. His stories weren’t even all that good. There were some stories that were with a good lesson. Such as the ones about when his brother would trick him into doing something. That lesson is that you shouldn’t trust your older brother. Also, he has anger management problems. He said so himself. He later became a therapist though. I guess that’s a good thing.
He talks about child abuse towards the end of the book. This one guy named Jonah had anger management problems. He sold drugs on the street and couldn’t get a decent job. So his wife Deeana had to find a job and she worked two jobs. While she was gone through out the whole day, Jonah had to watch their little baby girl. Her name was Shauna. One day, when Shauna kept crying, Jonah got really mad and couldn’t control himself. He grabbed Shauna and shook her. Jonah went to jail for six months and his daughter was put in a place in New Mexico. The reason Jonah came into Chris’s office was because he felt terrible about what he had done and couldn’t live with himself.
Now his wife was pregnant with another child. And they were still married. Crutcher was kind of amazed at that. He thought that not many couples would stay together after the father shook the child and damaged her. Jonah wanted to support the family, but the only way he could do that was to sell drugs on the street again. Chris told him that it was not a good idea. Jonah didn’t want to hurt this new baby. He had already completed anger management classes and was getting better. But he couldn’t live with what he did. After that day, Jonah called two days later and told Chris that he decided to never again hurt this new baby, and that he will be a better father and husband to his family. That was the last Chris ever heard of him.
There was another story about a little girl named Allie. The first time he saw her, she was trying to wash of the brown of her skin. She was doing that so that she would be allowed to sit at the dinner table with her all-white half-brothers or play with toys. Her mother had slept with a black man and she was the result of that. The man that her mother was living with currently was white and he did not like Allie. He was her stepfather and he treated her badly. He argued constantly with her mother and that made Allie sad. But she was a happy child and was always smiling. But she was living proof of the sin that her mother committed and she knew that she would probably not be accepted by her stepfather anytime soon.
This is just sad and it is more of a racism issue than of a child abuse issue. The stories like this one and the one previously shows the more serious side of Chris Crutcher. His other side is just a childish side. When he was little he was a little wimpy kid that couldn’t do anything no matter how hard he tried. And that wasn’t very hard because he was also a lazy boy. So the whole book was about how his life was being a dweeb and a loser. His brother constantly manipulated him. I can say that I did learn something from this book. Some valuable lessons, but I learned a lot about Chris Crutcher and about his life before he became a writer.