Friendswood Reading Log Questions

Danielle Lobosco
English 1101
Professor Young
January 29, 2017

Friendswood Reading Log Question 

1.  Willa Lambert has a secret. She has a friend named Dani. Willa also has hallucinations. She first talks about a hallucination of a dead plant that grew legs, fur and wings. Then ended up flying through the window. She looked up hallucination on her computer. “She wondered if other people saw similar flashes of shape or color, as if the air had hidden wrinkles in that held things, objects that appeared just for a few seconds when the atmosphere unfolded.”(pg 21) She then started to right down all of her visions in a notebook. Willa seems to have a good relationship with her parents.

2. Dex has a good relationship with his mom. He gets bullied by the football players and he does not have many friends. He is a loner. Dex’s sister is a cheerleader. Dex’s mother asks him to watch out for his sister but he comments back “What makes you think she’ll let me.”(pg 39) Dex seems to be an outcast from his peers.

3. Hal is a real estate salesman. He is struggling in his career, he tries to be a could church man but it is very hard for him. His relationship with Darlene does not seem to be good, he cheated on her with someone else. And his relationship with Cully also seems strained. His son is better at playing football then he was. “Hal had been a good player…But he’d never be as good a player as his son was.”(pg 15) Hal and his son have the sport in common but Cully is better.

4. Lee’s daughter passed away from a blood disease cause by chemical dumping. This affects greatly and she spends her life trying to prove that is the chemical dumping that caused her daughter to die. “She pulled out the jars and the shovel from her bag, bent down, cleared a section of weeds away, dug a shallow hole, and filled the jar with soil.” Pg 10) Taft Properties do not want Lee to be testing the soil. But Lee is determined to justify her daughter death. It seems as though she is an outsider in the community.

5.  The chemical dumping that happened in Friendswood affected many people. Oily sludge began to come out of the grass in Friendswood. When testing the soil Lee saw a “there was a thin gasoline smell, and the mud had an oily, purple sheen.” Taft Properties and the city are responsible for the  chemical dumping. The community has moved away and Lee one of the main characters is still trying to prove that the chemical dumping is what caused her daughter to die. The environment has been ruined because of the chemical dumping.

6. In Friendswood a chemical dumping cause sludge to come out of the grown and completely destroyed the town. The chemical dumping lead to the town being forced to evacuate and even cause death from a blood disease caused by the chemical dumping. This is similar to East Chicago, Indiana. In East Chicago the contamination caused more than 1,000 residents to be evacuated. It also caused people to be exposed to toxins. These toxins long term affects on those effected.

Works Cited

Steinke, Rene. Friendswood. Waterville, ME: Thorndike, 2015.