34 pages • 1 hour read
Kimberly Willis HoltMy Louisiana Sky
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Tiger, Jesse Wade, and Tiger’s mother go swimming in the creek. Tiger is tasked with watching her mother, and she observes her mother’s natural physical beauty. Later, they check out books from a traveling library that stopped at Tiger’s school outside the gymnasium. While her mother is browsing, Tiger wanders off to watch her peers having fun. Tiger’s mother becomes distraught when she can’t find Tiger and causes a scene, much to Tiger’s embarrassment. Other girls at the school laugh at them—girls including Abby Lynn, the most popular (and, Tiger believes, the prettiest) girl in school. Even Jesse Wade hesitates to make eye contact with Tiger after the episode, but he eventually looks up and smiles at her. Tiger remembers that Abby Lynn will be hosting a swimming party, and Tiger wonders doubtfully if she will be invited.
Chapter 6 Summary
For the first time, after the stressful incident with her mother at school, Tiger begins to resent her parents and their differences. Granny reassures her that the girls who laughed at them that day at the school aren’t worth her time, but Tiger isn’t sure. Corrina watches too much television and ignores her family until Granny makes a rule limiting TV time. Tiger waits for her invitation to the swimming party.
Chapter 7 Summary
Tiger is insecure about her appearance, feeling that she doesn’t look as “grown up” as the other girls in her school. She realizes that she hasn’t been invited to the swimming party when she goes to Jesse Wade’s house and finds him gone. On her walk back home, she runs into Jesse Wade, who left the party when he realized Tiger hadn’t been invited. When he sees she is crying, he tries to comfort her and ultimately kisses her. Shocked, Tiger pushes him away and runs home.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
These chapters center on ideas of appearance, judgment, and growing up.
From the beginning, Tiger’s mother is described as beautiful. While swimming in the creek, Tiger reflects that “[h]er wet stringy hair didn’t hide her beauty” (51). Even though Corrina couldn’t care less, she is still beautiful. Tiger, on the other hand, feels she herself looks like her father, slender with red hair and pale skin. She doesn’t feel beautiful, and she feels even more insecure because of her wardrobe; looking at the other girls in her class, Tiger wonders “what [she] might look like with saddle oxfords on [her] feet and a bobbed hairdo” (54). Because of her working-class background, Tiger lacks the tools to change her appearance to fit in.
Judgment in the face of difference also appears in these chapters. In Chapter 5 when Corrina makes a scene after the traveling library in the gymnasium, Tiger is humiliated. The event is an inciting incident—or an incident that sets other parts of the plot into motion and spurs character development. After being embarrassed in front of her classmates by her mother, Tiger begins to resent that Corrina is so different from the other mothers; she expresses this to her grandmother through judgment, saying that “anyone with sense” (64) wouldn’t watch the television shows her mother seems to enjoy so much. Granny coaches Tiger through these feelings, but Tiger’s sense of ostracization remains.
Tiger’s insecurity about her appearance and the judgment of others also tie into ideas about growing up. Tiger recalls feeling insecure in her swimsuit because “the other girls’ developing figures probably filled their suits across the top and bottom” (68). Tiger is lanky, even for an adolescent—a far cry from the full-figured beauty standards of the late 1950s.
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By Kimberly Willis Holt
