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No Matter How Loud I Shout Essay

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When I first started reading the book, ‘No Matter How Loud I Shout,’ by Alex Kotlowitz, I didn’t know what to expect as I have not learned a lot about what life is like in public housing. One thing which surprised me was, in the preface, Lajoe, when asked about writing a book about her children and the children in the area, she replied that they could but that, “there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.” This surprised me because I didn’t know that public housing could be so bad that children could grow up too fast. After reading more into the book though, I can understand why Lajoe said what she said. This is because, throughout the book, it talks about several days where there were shootings and how gang life ran rampant. An example …show more content…

One of my favorite was when the book talked about Pharaoh. Pharaoh is the youngest brother and is one of the kids that Lajoe is sure can make it out of the project homes. At the beginning of the book, it talks about how Pharaoh has a stutter which resulted from him getting scared several times by things happening outside. As a result, he had trouble talking to people and doing well at school since it was hard for him to communicate because his stutter slowed him down. Throughout the book, it talked about how Pharaoh wanted to do well in a spelling bee that was coming up and the first time he did the spelling be, he couldn’t say a word right because of his stutter. Because of this, Pharaoh was determined to work towards getting rid of his stutter and he did so by practicing saying words out loud everyday until he was able to get his stutter under control. As a result, by the time the second spelling bee came around, Pharaoh was able to complete it in second place. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and I hope that the kids later on were able to get out of the projects and into better

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