Thornton 1

Taiah Thornton

Professor Young

English 1101-3A

31 January 2017

1. Willa Lambert is a teenage girl in high school who has visions. Willa and her parents used to be close when she was a young girl but as she got older they grew about. Her parents are very anti-Satan and don’t like any of those things. “Just a year ago, she and her dad used to go running on the old golf course in the early morning,” as it states in the novel. (Steinke 9) Willa also has certain visions and hallucinations a few of them being, “There had been a little girl, reaching up with both arms for Willa to hold her. There had been a naked man with thick thighs and a beard…” (Steinke 4)

2. Dex is also an awkward teenage boy who has a crush on Willa. His parents are not together anymore and he feels bad for his mother. In the novel, Dex doubts any man would love his mother again. In school, Dex is awkward about Willa and friends and just says anything to make conversation.

3. Hal is Cully’s father in the novel. He works as a real estate agent for a living. He believes that people need jobs and that building houses over the chemicals is safe now. Hal is very prayerful, however, he has a hard time selling houses to customers.

4. Lee Knowles is the mother of Jack and Jess. The significant event that happens in Lee’s life is the death of her daughter. Jess died from a terrible blood disease and her mother strongly believes that the chemicals in the field next to where they lived caused it. She argued that nothing, including houses, should no longer be built on these grounds in this community.

5. Chemical dumping his disastrous effects on the Friendswood community. There is a serious pollution site where chemical byproducts of oil refining were dumped on the land and into the water. The EPA was responsible for the chemical dump in the novel Sy said, “says its runoff from the oil refinery, but I checked with the city, the EPA says its such a small concentration of stuff and it can’t hurt anything.” (Steinke 7) Signs that the environment and community had been affected by the chemical dumping were that people were getting ill, houses were being destroyed and land was being torn apart.

6. As we know in Friendswood there is a severe chemical dumping happening contaminating all the land and water. A similar problem is happening in Flint, Michigan where the water is being invested by lead. This contamination started in Late 2014 and has being going on ever since. The Michigan Department of Environment Quality blames cold weather, aging pipes and a population decline. The next couple years, very high levels of lead were detected in a resident’s water sample. In both these crisis’s the community water is contaminated with bacteria and its causing the populations to become ill.

Works Cited

Steinke, Rene. Friendswood, Texas, August 2014, pp. 1-60