The short story “Teenage Wasteland” by Anne Tyler is about the lack of communication between Donny and his mom. Donny seems to give a lot of problems and Daisy, his mom, doesn’t seem to knowwhat’s going on with him. She tries to understand and reach her son through the school counselor. But nothing seems to help his irresponsibility and lack of commitment to school. Focusing on her son’slife, Daisy becomes less focused on the daughter’s and kind of leaves her husband aside. As a solution to Donny’s problem, his mom decides to get him a tutor/psychologist so he can help him studyand get good grades. This just makes the problem even worse because now Donny is going to pay attention to the tutor and stop paying attention to his mom. Donny stops seeing her completely as aparental figure. Eventually, Donny keeps having problems at school and he gets expelled. All this is revolving in Daisy’s head and she cannot understand what she did or what went wrong.Personally, I think that with Donny having so many problems, Daisy didn’t know how to deal with them and she didn’t react the way she was supposed to. I know she tried to deal with the problemherself, but she gave up quickly. She was supposed to keep trying to fix everything instead of getting someone else to do it for her. This just makes everything worse.
“A Worn Path” is thestory of Phoenix, an old African-American lady, who is walking down a little road in direction to a hospital to get a medicine for her grandson. During her walk through the path, she encountersseveral obstacles and has to deal with some challenges that are put in her way. After surpassing them, she finally gets to the hospital where her memory fails because she suddenly can’t remember whyshe was there in the first place. After, the nurse helps her remember and gives her the medicines for her grandson, who we never know if he is actually alive or if it’s just product of her…