Tillie's Family and the Capulet Family

A couple of days ago I finished reading The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, which was pretty good.  Just a little while ago, I read Romeo and Juliet.  When comparing the two families, Tillie's family can relate to the Capulet family from Romeo and Juliet in a lot of ways, although they definitely aren't exactly alike.

For one, both Juliet's parents and Beatrice, the only parent to Tillie and her sister Ruth, and very protective of their kids.  The Capulet family, for example, never really lets Juliet into the world.  She is never able to walk around in the streets of Verona or anything.  Instead, Juliet mostly stays up in her room or at least in the Capulet home.  This, however, wasn't uncommon in that time period.  Beatrice is also very protective.  She doesn't want Tillie to get made fun of at school, so she tries to keep her home and is always telling her not to wear the ugly clothes she wears so that she won't get laughed at.  This is a very mean way of trying to protect Tillie from being laughed at, because it probably really hurts Tillie's feelings and also makes it so she can't go to school.  However, it is Beatrice's way of "protecting" her.

Also, both families have controlling parents.  This is has a lot to do with them being protective, because to protect Juliet from the world, the Capulets have to control where she goes and what she does, and to protect Tillie from being made fun of, Beatrice is controlling her and making her stay home.  Another thing that the Capulets do to control Juliet is deciding who she marries.  They want her to marry Paris, which is not what Juliet wants.  Beatrice wants to control Tillie by forcing her to wear fancy-ish clothing for the science fair.  As for Ruth, Beatrice wants to get her to think that no boy or man can be trusted.  She's trying to control Ruth so that she doesn't end up like she did--marrying a horrible man that she always fought with and ended up divorcing.  This is also a good example of her being protective.

Another similarity between the two families is how, even though they care about each other, both Juliet's parents and Tillie's and Ruth's mom can get very angry at them easily.  Beatrice, for example, is always threatening to kill their rabbit(and actually ends up doing it) if the girls don't clean up the rabbit droppings around the house.  Also, when Ruth wants to come to the science fair with Tillie and Beatrice, Beatrice gets very angry when Ruth says she's coming even though Beatrice won't let her, so she shoves her.  As for the Capulets, when Juliet says she doesn't wish to marry Paris, Capulet(her father) gets extremely mad.  He calls her a worthless piece of trash and says that if she doesn't marry Paris, then she may as well live on the streets and never come back to their home again.  He obviously got a little too angry too easily.

These two families definitely have their differences as well.  First, in the Capulet family Juliet is an only child with a mother and a father.  Tillie, however, has a sister and a mother, but no father.  Also, the Capulets live in Italy in somewhere between the 1300s and the late 1500s.  Tillies family lives somewhere in America in around the 1960s.  Another difference is that it seems like Beatrice actually knows and loves her daughters a lot more than Lord Capulet and Lady Capulet know and love Juliet.

So, these families do have some things in common, even if they are very different.  If I had to choose to live in either of the families it might be hard to choose at first.  Both of them do not seem like the best families, but I would probably go with Tillie's family.  Beatrice seems to actually love her daughters and care about them, even if it doesn't seem like it all the time.