Peeling the Onion by Wendy Orr

Peeling the Onion is about a girl named Anna who gets into a car accident that changed her entire life. She was a normal 17-year-old popular girl whose favorite activity was karate (Orr, 1997). Halfway through the novel, she turns 18, and according to the text, this would mean that she is transitioning from middle adolescence into late adolescence (Steinberg, 2011). She had her life all figured out, and had just received the first step to her dream of being successful in karate and moving to a new stage in a relationship (Orr, 1997). Though she survived the crash, she broke her neck, fractured her feet, and suffered brain damage (Orr, 1997). She spends the entire book going through therapy and trying to put her life back together, while coping with the changes that she now has to endure. Her body is permanently crippled, and her old life is completely changed. Everything in her old life—karate, Hayden (her boyfriend), and Caroline (a friend who abandons her), and her old self—is gone, and she has to try to adjust to the new life of being scarred for life (Orr, 1997).
In the beginning of the novel, one of the first scenes that happen is Anna winning a karate match. She ends up winning a trophy, which puts her on the track to winning a black belt, which was her dream. Her plan was to eventually become a Physical Education teacher, and for her, getting a black belt would be the right step towards that goal (Orr, 1997). In a way, winning the black belt would be a sort of rite of passage for her. A rite of passage is a type of ritual that transitions a person from one stage of life or social status to a different stage or status, especially the transition from adolescence to adulthood (Steinberg, 2011). For Anna, the black belt would ...

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... stresses, changes, and issues that typical adolescents have to deal with. She still had to figure out what her plans were for her future, which ended up changing due to the accident; she still had relationships that developed or ended, and she had to figure out how to deal with those stressors; she still had to go through the process of finding out who she was and what her identity meant like other adolescents her age; and she had to deal with the transition from being a typical teenager to an emerging adult. The entire novel centers on these changes and how Anna reacts to the many twists that come up in her life, and because of this, the novel shows what it is like to live through the adolescent stage of life.

Works Cited

Orr, Wendy. Peeling the Onion. New York: Holiday House, 1997. Print.
Steinberg, L. (2011). Adolescence. (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.