Reading Response

Marta Brennan                    October 20, 2014

Class 806       ELA Reading Response

“The terrified mother perched on the roof of Eva’s hut and called to her baby all day. I watched that mother and wondered what she would have done when her new babies came the next year. Would she have kept the older baby or pushed it out of the nest to make room for the perfectly formed new ones?”

- Whisper

The book Whisper, by Chris Struyk-Bonn, is about a sixteen year-old girl, Whisper, who has a cleft palate and lives in an encampment with three other young rejects and their caregiver, Nathanael, all of whom are outcasts from a society that kills or abandons anyone with a physical or mental disability. When Whisper’s mother dies, she leaves Whisper a violin, which Nathanael teaches her to play. Whisper’s father comes to claim her, and she becomes his house slave, her disfigurement hidden by a black veil. But when she proves rebellious, she is taken to the city to live with other rejects at a house called Purgatory Palace, where she has to make difficult decisions for herself and for her friends. Throughout the book, the author uses Whisper’s violins to represent how she handles her emotions.

One example of Whisper using her carved violin to represent her emotions is when she says, “Closing my hand around the violin at my neck, I brought it out of my shirt and pressed it against my cheek. The coolness of the wood soothed my hot face” (page 153). This quote shows that the thought of Jeremia, one of the rejects who lived with her in the woods that gave her the violin, calms her down. She uses his love and support for her to hold her down and to stay sane. She uses the violin to help her when she is not feeling in control of her emotions, actions and thoughts.

Furthermore, Whisper says, “I sat up in the chair, lifted the violin to my shoulder, lowered my chin, closed my eyes, and played the song of Whisper when she had known who she was and where she belonged” (page 117). This quote is meaningful, because music is the one thing that Whisper had that made her feel that she belonged and that she was wanted, and slowly, she was losing that too. Whisper’s violin was represented to show how she was feeling lonely and empty, because she was losing the peaceful and safe emotions she had when she played her violin.

In addition, Whisper says, “Too late, I felt the string around my neck stretch taut and snap. I let go, and the hand-carved violin dropped through my coat to the carpet of the hallway and I stepped on it, snapping the carving in two… and I stumbled, crying out. I sobbed and leaned against the wall, trying to catch my breath” (page 271). This quote shows that Whisper believed that there was nothing left to hold onto, because the violin symbolized the love and support from her family in the woods, but she snapped it in half.

In conclusion, the author used Whisper’s violins to express the single thing she had left that was not broken in her life and that she shouldn’t give up, and she should have hope. The violin was a symbol to hold on to what you have and even in the darkest of times, you always have someone or something there for you. Teens can relate to this story, because many have felt lonely and felt that they ruined something, such as a bond or relationship or a gift, between themselves and someone else.