There Are No Children Here

How is this novel similar to other pieces of literature (poems, novels, films) that we have studied in class?


While reading There Are No Children Here, it reminded me of reading The Pearl my John Stienbeck in 8th grade. The Pearl is a short novel about a poor mexican family living in poverty in a bad neighborhood. They then find a large pearl in the ocean and ironically it brings them bad luck and terrible misfortune. The second part of the story isn't anything like There are no Children Here, but the setting is very similar. In the book I'm reading, the family is living in the the 'projects' of Chicago. This area used to be very nice and relativly wealthy, but then the middle-class blacks and whites moved away, leaving the area an undesireable living situation in poverty. Crime is a major problem for the family in TANCH, especially when it comes to their mailboxes on the first floor (Kotlowitz 9). Robery is also a threat for the family in TP, after discovering the large pearl, the community becomes jelous and some even try to steal the precious jewel. Overall these two stories are similar in that they are set in a poor neighborhood where he characters are just trying to get by.

Another novel that we had read and analized through out school it Warriors Don't Cry. In this novel the main characters are black highschool students who are trying to attent a white highschool in Little Rock, AR, and it is set back in a time when racial segregation in entirly different schools was compleatly normal and somewhat acceptable, by white that is. Through out the entire novel the other white students abuse the black students in horible ways such as steping on their heals til they bleed or splashing acid in their eyes. They continuously try to get the blacks to leave their white school, simply because of racial discrimination. This is similar to how Pharoah and Lafeyette feel at times, but less extreame. Life is hard for blacks in this time, but even harder for blacks in the lower class. It eventually becomes brutally evident that they are not being treated the same as whites and Pharoah thinks to himself, "the police probably don't like black children or something. The white polices don't like the black children. That's what I believe" (Kotlowitz 161). Incidence between the cops and Lafeyette arise throughout the book and increase of understanding of the extent of discrimination they are living in. These two novels are alike in their description of racial descrimination against blacks.