What scenes struck a chord with you? Are there any quotes in the book that you found meaningful?

What scenes struck a chord with you? Are there any quotes in the book that you found meaningful?

A couple of quotes stuck with me -

"Or it could just have been the way powerful words linger in a well-told story."

"But Cal, today's newspaper even says the new Civil Rights Act will include women."

"Everybody's got a right to try filling their God-given potential, right?"

The scene about Corky's first kiss and crush took me back as well.

When Pastor Pete gave a sermon, he said "There are none so blind as those who will not see.". The pastor had just left the bedside of Mack Corcoran after what happened to him and America.. I found this so profound.

From page 6: "Although some things change about growing up, the time in which you grow up isn't one of them. It's forever changing, shaping you in ways you can't control or anticipate. As each year passes, the only wild card is you. In the very same way, the place you grow up shapes you as well."

From page 82: "There is a young moment when the world can suddenly revel that it doesn't revolve around you. This was Corky's moment. Grasping in inches the concept of what she'd one day know as 'empathy', Corky began to understand why America was upset."

Budding maturity leaps off the page with each realization that life was changing if only Corky took notice!

So many scenes struck a chord with me! One that especially did was the lunch counter scene. While I never witnessed a lunch counter protest, it did bring back related memories. By the late sixties when I was in college, everyone seemed to understand that this type of segregation was not acceptable. But I was astounded to find that people still accepted male/female lunch segregation. A well-known restaurant near the college I attended, openly did not allow women to eat in their dining room during lunch hours. It stemmed from wanting to move things quickly for business lunches - but there was the stereotype that men were from businesses and that women would take longer, take up space, and be there for social reasons. I remember an action being planned by the local NOW, but I was not present and cannot remember how it turned out. I just think it is interesting that even after racism was acknowledged as wrong, it took a lot longer in my experience, for sexism to be accepted as wrong.

Miss Yoakum may have not been all together mentally, but this was especially sound advice:

"A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It's a book's boon and bane. But it is also its raison d'etre--its reason for being--to meet you where you are. Exactly like a great piece of music." pp.81-82

"Although some things never change about growing up, the time in which you grow up isn't one of them."

"In the same way, the place you grow up shapes you as well."

"Separate but equal - nobody questioned it, or if they did, nobody was listening."

I love pd the quote “In the same way, the place you grow up shapes you as well.”

This totally hit home for me growing up on a small island where I was allowed so much freedom and yet I lived in a very protected bubble. Later in life I was hit hard by several events that I couldn’t wrap my head around because I had been impacted by this very protected upbringing. Not sure if I’m explaining myself well, but how I grew up made it hard for me to understand how people could treat others so poorly.

"Or it could just have been the way powerful words linger in a well-told story."

I’m a voracious reader and I absolutely love when a “well-told story lingers” with me.

Page 81 - "A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It's a book's boon or bain. But it's also it's reason for being - to meet you where you are."
This spoke to me because I lived in this exact time period and have both very favorable memories and not-so-much times in that era. I found it so easy to related to almost everything in this book.

Page 82, "Everybody's got their own story...and they're swirling around me every moment of every day." As a young teenager, Corky is beginning to understand empathy. The quote holds true. When we listen to the stories, we learn why people are the way they are.