April Raintree: A Challenging Search for Identity The constant shifting of tectonic plates can lead a future of rough, uneven or desturbed terrain. Often times when plates collide mountain ranges or volcanoes are formed but the relationship and distance between continents can also change. In the book “April Raintree” by Beatrice Culleton, the constant shifts in April’s life cause a permanent confusion as to who she is and how she identifies herself later on in life. This confusion results in many struggles due to her erratic shifts in Relationships, lifestyles, and emotions. Throughout April’s life, she is forced to uproot from homes and relationships and quickly thrust back into new ones causing her to struggle with who her true family …show more content…
When April first moves in with the Dions, their generosity and love welcome April into their family and although she does not feel like a complete part to their family, she loves them and knows that is was loved back. During her time with them, her confidence begins to build. The Dions treat her just as they would their own children and celebrate her achievements with recognition and praise. April feels as an equal to other children and believes she has value which she later struggles with. She explains her confidence when, after the Dions celebrate her good grades she says, “For an eight year-old, I had a very large head for a while”(22). By saying this, April is identifying the fact that she knows she had high confidence in her self but after a while, that changed. Following this however, April’s life changes and her pride and self assurance begins to diminish. When April is moved to a second foster family the Derosiers, their neglect and abuse towards her cause her to feel awful about herself and her heritage. The family make April and later her sister Cheryl do all the chores, they beat them and they verbally abuse them with racist names and hurtful stories about their parents’ alcohol problems. This family’s treatment towards April and her sister only make her more ashamed and self conscious about her Metis background which has a lasting effect on her life as an adult. April’s phsycological well-being experiences many more difficulties as her life progresses that cause her self-esteem and identity to struggel due to society’s views and treatment of Metis women and
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
Working as a teacher serving at-risk four-year-old children, approximately six of her eighteen students lived in foster care. The environment introduced Kathy to the impact of domestic violence, drugs, and family instability on a developing child. Her family lineage had a history of social service and she found herself concerned with the wellbeing of one little girl. Angelica, a foster child in Kathy’s class soon to be displaced again was born the daughter of a drug addict. She had been labeled a troublemaker, yet the Harrisons took the thirty-hour training for foster and adoptive care and brought her home to adopt. Within six months, the family would also adopted Angie’s sister Neddy. This is when the Harrison family dynamic drastically changes and Kathy begins a journey with over a hundred foster children passing through her home seeking refuge.
...approval by their family and the people around are considered as the most common trend between teenagers around the world and are used throughout the novel. Josephine was first introduced to the reading knowing that she was unsure of her identity and how she was searching for acceptance from her grandmother due to her illegitimacy. Marchetta created Josephine’s characteristic as one that the readers can truly understand and allow them to be able to feel a connection and a relation between the characters in the novel and themselves; it can make them realize that this is a social issues that each generation of teenagers face on a daily basis. The characters in the novel accompanied by the themes such as stereotypes and social statuses supported the author’s idea of creating a novel in which comment on the social issues and reflect reality within the novel.
Cathy's upbringing did not seem to be a likely place to foster dissent and animosity in the young girl. Her pa...
After Mrs. Dion became ill, April is placed with the DeRosiers. The DeRosiers where both physically and verbally abusive, to April and Cheryl. Through this April would continue to try to supress her native heritage as much as possible. The DeRosiers Children continue to harass April by starting rumors about her, and running her life in school, and was called “Gramma Squaw”. Mrs. DeRosiers would make the situation worse, by giving her clothing that were considered very ugly, and she wouldn’t let April alter them, by sewing thing on them. This continues Aprils need to become rich and important, and she says “if I became so rich and important, people wouldn’t care that I had a prod metis as a sister.” This quote shows how she does not consider herself a proud Metis, or even a Metis.
Although this story is told in the third person, the reader’s eyes are strictly controlled by the meddling, ever-involved grandmother. She is never given a name; she is just a generic grandmother; she could belong to anyone. O’Connor portrays her as simply annoying, a thorn in her son’s side. As the little girl June Star rudely puts it, “She has to go everywhere we go. She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (117-118). As June Star demonstrates, the family treats the grandmother with great reproach. Even as she is driving them all crazy with her constant comments and old-fashioned attitude, the reader is made to feel sorry for her. It is this constant stream of confliction that keeps the story boiling, and eventually overflows into the shocking conclusion. Of course the grandmother meant no harm, but who can help but to blame her? O’Connor puts her readers into a fit of rage as “the horrible thought” comes to the grandmother, “that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125).
Towards the middle of the memoir, the theme is shown through the irony of Jeannette’s mother’s situation as well as Jeannette’s feelings towards
So you’ll start with alcohol and drugs. From there, you get into shoplifting and prostitution, and in and out of jails. You’ll live with men that abuse you. And on it goes.” Throughout the book we see April stay away from pride and Cheryl embraces it.
Narrated by the mother of two daughters, the story opens with an examination of one daughter's favoring of appearances over substance, and the effect this has on her relatives. The mother and her younger daughter, Maggie, live in an impoverished rural area. They anticipate the arrival of the elder daughter, Dee, who left home for college and is bringing her new husband with her for a visit. The mother recalls how, as a child, Dee hated the house in which she was raised. It was destroyed in a fire, and as it was burning, Dee "(stood) off under the sweet gum tree... a look of concentration on her face", tempting her mother to ask, "'why don't you do a dance around the ashes?'" (Walker 91) She expects Dee will hate their current house, also. The small, three-room house sits in a pasture, with "no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides" (Walker 92), and although, as Dee asserts, they "choose to live" in such a place, Dee keeps her promise to visit them (Walker 92). Her distaste for her origins is felt by her mother and Maggie, who, in anticipation of Dee's arrival, internalize her attitudes. They feel to some extent their own unworthiness. The mother envisions a reunion in which her educated, urbane daughter would be proud of her. In reality, she describes her...
Love has the power to do anything. Love can heal and love can hurt. Love is something that is indescribable and difficult to understand. Love is a feeling that cannot be accurately expressed by a word. In the poem “The Rain” by Robert Creeley, the experience of love is painted and explored through a metaphor. The speaker in the poem compares love to rain and he explains how he wants love to be like rain. Love is a beautiful concept and through the abstract comparison to rain a person is assisted in developing a concrete understanding of what love is. True beauty is illuminated by true love and vice versa. In other words, the beauty of love and all that it entails is something true.
She always getting into a fight with her mother all the time about her beauty, because she has a habit of looking at herself in the mirror wherever she found one, “…she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into the mirror or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was alright.” (126). Moreover, her mother always compares her with her sister, June, which makes she feel even more hatred toward her mother, “Why don’t you clean your room like your sister? How’ve you got your hair fixed – what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don’t see your sister using that junk.” (126). Her mother, whenever she gossips on the phone with her aunties. They always admire June over her, “June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked, and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her minded was all filled with trashy daydreams.” (126). To them, June is always the best, because she is good at almost everything and Connie cannot do anything right. Therefore, when Connie’s mother says something or complaint about her beauty, she rolls her eyeballs and wishes that her mother was
At the age of ten, most children are dependent on their parents for everything in their lives, needing a great deal of attention and care. However, Ellen, the main character and protagonist of the novel Ellen Foster, exemplifies a substantial amount of independence and mature, rational thought as a ten-year-old girl. The recent death of her mother sends her on a quest for the ideal family, or anywhere her father, who had shown apathy to both she and her fragile mother, was not. Kaye Gibbons’ use of simple diction, unmarked dialogue, and a unique story structure in her first novel, Ellen Foster, allows the reader to explore the emotions and thoughts of this heroic, ten-year-old girl modeled after Gibbons’ own experiences as a young girl. Kaye Gibbons’ experiences as a child are the foundations for this.
...ndurance of poverty, as we witness how Walls has turned her life around and told her inspiring story with the use of pathos, imagery, and narrative coherence to inspire others around her (that if she can do it, so can others). Jeannette made a huge impact to her life once she took matters into her own hands and left her parents to find out what life has in store for her and to prove to herself that she is a better individual and that anything is possible. Despite the harsh words and wrongful actions of Walls’ appalling parents who engage her through arduous experiences, she remained optimistic and made it through the most roughest and traumatic obstacles of her life at the age of three. Walls had always kept her head held high and survived the hardships God put upon her to get to where she is today; an author with a best selling novel to tell her bittersweet story.
Tee’s time with her Aunt Tantie taught her independence and self-sufficiency, but also made her understand the true struggle that comes with living underprivileged. She lived in a rural, accommodated area, though she was educationally advanced. When Tee left to live with her Aunt Beatrice, everything flipped. As time passed, she began to feel as if where she came from, living with Aunt
The three Smales children, Victor, Royce and Gina, had not experienced, and therefore had not expected to live a life of luxury amongst people of their “own” kind. This innocence contributes greatly to the rate and comfort in which they adjust to living in July’s village. Bam and Maureen may not have felt prejudice towards the black race, but were certainly prejudice about the lifestyle in which they must now live, a lifestyle completely stripped of any and all luxuries they once enjoyed. All of the family members, facing a new way of life, adjust to their situation in radically different ways. Each one drifts in their own direction in search of comfort and acceptance throughout their experiences living amongst July’s people.