March 2-8

Blu’s Hanging was hard for me to read in some areas. I had to set the book down and take a break when there was detail about the cruel behaviors and acts towards children. I suspected sexual abuse when I started to read about these sadistic types of behaviors and then I finally came to the across the part where the Reyes children were being abused by their Uncle. It was hard to stomach the section where he was asking for the youngest to go the room because she was the “tightest.” I was also mad at Poppy for allowing his children to be subjected to this type of behaviors. I think the saving grace was when Big Sis moved to their island. I finally felt the children had an advocate. I also enjoyed all of the interjections about what was good luck and bad luck and how closely the children followed these beliefs. I think that the children equated these ritual beliefs to their mother, it was a way for them to stay close to her. I was also about seventy pages into the book before I started to make sense of the title. Although the main focus revolves around all of the children there are lots of comments on Blu. Blu’s obsession with Clint Eastwood and how he hangs the bad guys is constantly brought up. Then there are constant references to the hanging of kitten which eventually leads to blu’s several real hangings. When Blu is hung by the Reyes family he is left physically scarred and unable to differentiate between the TV world of fiction and real life. He was unable to recognize that he was in physical world. Blu tries to use the fictional world to escape the pain of living in poverty, but he does not understand that the fictional world cannot be incorporated into his and he is physically harmed. Even the episode where he uses the bed sheets to escape and hangs from them, he ruins his good sheets to live a fictional world. This is also true of his “girlfriend’s” sexual acts because Blu says that he is flying away from his real life. He is unable to realize that he is too immature to understand the depths of being sexually active or why it is wrong for the Reyes’s uncle to be sleeping with the children, Blu comments that it looks like the children are having fun, and he stresses that no one else can know about it. Massie is also exposed to all of the scenes that Blu sees because he tells her about everything he experiences, even wet dreams. This is an illustration about how poverty travels down the line because the siblings tell each other and all of the kids are exposed to the same thing. Massie will grow up exposed to the corruption of society because she lacks the knowledge to differentiate fiction from reality and wrong from right. I think the younger children suffered more because they remember less of the mother and see less and interact less with Poppy.