In Fairest, one quote that stood out to me was ¨ Pregnant women were therefore advised not to spend too much time in the sun for fear that their baby would be born a sunchild ¨. I’m not sure if I’m interpreting this correctly, but I made the assumption that the term sunchild is another word for albinism. It seems that it is a part of Talusan´s culture to care deeply about one’s appearance. The simple fact that myths like this exist and are passed down from generation to generation shows that Talusan would face obstacles regarding her looks for the rest of her life. This may give reason to why she doesn’t want her book cover to have anything to do with her looks. She says in ¨The Cover of My Face¨What’s more, one of the greatest luxuries of being an author is that I can separate myself from my physical presence¨(Talusan). Her appearance has been such a huge part of how others perceive her therefore being an author finally gives her the chance to exist outside of her looks and escape the famous myths she’d heard about albinism. In ¨Ordinary Girls¨ one quote that stood out to me was ¨It wasnt the haircut she said chuckling, it was my bad hair. Your fathers fault. Your father and his black family¨ (Diaz). Jaquira seems to be someone whose family plays a large part in her identity. In this moment, her grandmother inflicts negativity on her by making her think her fathers black traits are not beautiful. Even in ¨La Otra¨, she says I knew that these were things meant for girls, and that I was supposed to like them. But I had no interest in my mother’s curtains, or her tubes of red lipstick, or her dresses, or the dolls Grandma Mercy and Titi Sandy sent from Miami¨ (Diaz). Jaquira determines a lot of her identity, what she does like, and what she does not like based on different ideas presented to her by her family.  I predict that the theme of self hatred and confusion will show up a lot in this book.One moment that stood out to me from Kiese Laymon’s excerpt of ¨Heavy¨ is the part of the book where his grandmother is wanting him to be sympathetic toward white people during the Rodney King riots. He expresses ¨ I wanted to fairly fight white folk and I wanted to knock them out¨(Laymon). In this moment, he is so hurt that he has become insensitive to White people all in all. This may stem from when he was much younger and he experienced his grandmother working for a white family. He says in ¨Quick Feet¨, ¨Stealing their food felt like the only way to make the rotten feeling in my belly go away¨(Laymon).He wanted so badly for that white family to feel pain and suffering because that was all he knew and he was jealous that he had never seen white people struggle. For this reason, he did not feel pity for white people during the riots because he figured it was what they rightfully deserved. I expect this book to talk a lot about the little things that tell a profound story about the difference between white and blacks living in America. I expect for it to be filled with the author coming to sudden realizations of just how much inequality really exists.

Laymon, Kiese.¨ Quick feet: When Counting to Ten Isn’t Enough ¨. VQRonline. (2018).https://www.vqronline.org/memoir-articles/2018/10/quick-feet