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02/04/2026 1:01 pm
The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao is about Oscar de Leon, a Dominican-American nerd who wants to find love and become a writer. His family believes they have a generational curse on them, tied to dictatorship under Rafeal Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. He struggled with being lonely for years, but then he fell in love when he went to the Dominican Republic. However this relationship leads to trouble with a dangerous man and Oscar is killed, but he dies feeling he finally experienced love.
“Sweet Difficult Sounds” Nothukula is a girl who moved from Zimbabwe to America. She can speak English but feels nervous to talk because of her accent, she becomes very self conscious and afraid of being judged during class she has to read a poem to the class but forgets the words.
They are connected because they both deal with feeling like they don't fit in at school. “My tongue feels heavy in my mouth when I try to say the words,”. This quote shows her feeling unable to talk in fear of being judged. “I’m the permanent bachelor, he wrote in a letter to his sister-”. This quote is from my book, it shows Oscar feeling like he’ll never find love because of being himself.
Where in your story has a character felt like they didn’t fit in? How did they handle it? How did they impact the end of the story?
03/04/2026 9:09 am
In my book Brighter than the Sun by Daniel Aleman, Sol's family doesn’t have a lot of money after her mom got diagnosed with cancer they used all of their money to help her. Once she passed away they were left with piles of bills and continuous payments for their restaurant they were currently running. Once their restaurant stopped doing well they struggled to even keep it afloat. Sol goes to school in the U.S. because she was born there, but her family was not. They pay more in the U.S. and Sol needed to help her family pay for the bills of the restaurant or they would have to sell it. Sol started working in the U.S. which means she has to live with her friend, but she feels like she doesn’t fit in with any of her friends at school because her friends don’t have any of the same problems as her, her friends don’t have to work to provide for their family, her friends have time to do their school work and hang out with their friends, but she can’t. Sol has a really hard time dealing with this, once she starts hanging out with her friends more, she then starts getting behind in her school work. A quote to show that Sol feels like she doesn’t fit in with her friends, “I daydream about the warmth of the sun on my skin, the sound of the waves, and the feeling of the wind in my hair, telling myself that maybe next time–maybe next week, maybe sometime soon–I’ll get to just be a regular girl doing regular things with her friends on a Saturday” (Aleman 75).
03/04/2026 12:57 pm
In North of Happy by Adi Alsaid, Carlos feels like he doesn’t fit in both at home in Mexico and later in the United States. In Mexico, he doesn’t fit the expectations his parents have for him because he wants to become a chef instead of following their planned path. In the U.S., he also feels out of place at first because he is new, working a job far below his status, and dealing with grief over his brother Felix. “Everything here felt temporary, like I was just passing through.” (205, Alsaid). He handles this by running away from his old life and starting over in a restaurant, where he slowly works his way up and tries to figure out who he really is. By the end of the story, this experience of not fitting in helps him grow into his own identity and make his own choices, showing that he no longer lives just to meet other people’s expectations.
10/04/2026 10:42 am
tmartin27: In my book Strike Zone by Mike Lupica there is a family that is from the Dominican Republic. Nick is the main character, and he plays baseball. Nick is afraid of being deported because his parents are not here legally. The only thing that is stopping the main character from pursuing what he would like to do is the fact that his family is illegal and not supposed to be in the United States. Nick's parents are also not legal citizens so they are afraid of walking or being around people and work off their kids because they are legal. Although he could be stopped at any time by an officer and could possibly be deported. He struggles to fit in because he is not supposed to be here so he has to live with the fact of knowing that none of his family is legal and so he struggles to fit in, “‘You think we’re all criminal if we look the way we do?”’(Lupica 86)
