Empathy In 'Drums, Girls And Dangerous Pie'

Red Baseball hats and Empathy
Empathy; a 7 letter word that has so much meaning. But it gets stretched to the limit in this novel. When a child gets diagnosed with childhood cancer, many people’s first reaction is “I feel so bad” and that right there is empathy. When someone needs love and empathy at the worst time, are you going to help? Well in “Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie”, by Jordan Sonnenblick, the main characters go through a major change in their life. The main character, Steven, has a little brother who gets diagnosed with Leukemia. This diagnosis not only affects Jeffrey physically but Steven’s whole family financially and mentally. But when the community steps in to support his family, everything takes a turn for the better. For the first time, the family gets …show more content…
The description in the scene where the band shaves their heads shows that perfectly. Every action, thought, feeling, etc, is shown by the characters and this makes it even more bittersweet. The empathetic gesture of the band to shave their heads, gave hope to Steven’s family because it showed them even more that people do support them and are willing to sacrifice their hair just to make Jeffrey happy: “Jeffrey was running all over the room, hugging everyone, rubbing players’ heads for good luck…” (253). Sonnenblick used this subtle red baseball hat to symbolize all of this because once those hats came off, that’s when the empathy broke through. All of the emotion that the band members had when they saw how much Steven cared about Jeffrey that he would shave his head so that he wouldn’t feel like a misfit, caused them to have empathy and do the exact same thing. Jeffrey would not feel alone because he had high schoolers that looked like him. Steven’s family had support because of the emotion and empathy that everyone showed even more after people found out what the band did. When his family needed love the most, it was