Circle Of Gold

Earthly things can be very expensive, but love from a family is priceless, it is expressed in the following passage. By the end of the last hundred pages I've read (103-201) in Candy Dawson Boyd's Circle of Gold, Mattie finally realizes this, as does the readers. Mattie gives her mom a golden pin for mother's day, which she goes by any means to get, just to bring her family back together.

Mattie was a smart "A" student from Brooklyn, New York. Her only brother and twin brother Matthew is an artist that likes to draw and paint. She lives with her mom and brother, she used to live with her dad but he is deceased. One day, on his way from work some drunk drives hit his car and killed him. That day changed their lives forever. When her father left them, he took a part of everybody with him. Mattie and Mathew were only eleven years old when a lost their father, what a horrible loss, and at such a time that you understand how those things work, and you have feelings, one of the many prime times in your life that you need a father. As a result of this great loss, their family became dysfunctional, nobody cleans the house, her mother is never there because she leaves to work early, and comes home really late, and the kids have to make their own dinner. When her father left the family couldn't take it, they just fell apart, now her mother is always angry and never smiles. It is unusual to me how all this corruption can be caused by 1 man alone, I mean it was it choice to leave then at the point that he left them, but when you have to go, you just have to go. I t Mattie's best friend Toni Douglas, helps her through her problems a lot.

In her 220-page novel, first published in 1984, Boyd takes us on a journey and shows us how a young girl with a hard life must step it up to keep her family together, by any means necessary. On it we see at certain points young Mattie experiencing difficult times, both personal and financial. Under these pressures, she gives into her darker side and allows and is even pushed to steal. Mattie knows that mother's day is coming up, and for mother's day she wants to get her mom something really nice. So one day her and Toni go to the mall, then they walk into this jewelry store and there it was, so precious, a golden pin with a single moon pearl in the middle of it. She concluded that it would the perfect Mother's Day gift, but only it she could afford it she didn't have a dime. Later that night in her bed she thought to herself, "I