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April Raintree

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In the book In Search of April Raintree, April is the protagonist, she is the player the primary personal figure of the book. Her personality and characteristics portray many First Nations women in the 1960’s: “Woman have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious (Oscar Wilde). Throughout the book April changes drastically from A naïve child to an insecure teenager and finally to a mature young woman who is still not willing to accept her very own heritage and culture: “She is disavowing the part of her that might be since Native, a disavowal also reflected in her fear of being a mother of “brown-skinned babies” (p.117 and p.211).
Throughout April’s childhood when she was still living at home with her …show more content…

April has always been an intelligent girl who flourishes during her teens, but she eventually finds herself disgusted and unable to go on living with the DeRosier’s due to being treated so poorly in their care. This is when she decides to write about them in the Christmas story competition her class was partaking in for the Southern Journal, to get even with them for all the nasty rumors they had spread about her throughout the years she had spent with their family. She chose this way because she knew her social worker was a failure at seeing the issues at hand. Her way to out them on their actions was to write, it was her strongest subject and she knew she could do it and hoped that someone would listen: “All I want for Christmas is for somebody to listen to me and to believe in me” (p.76). From this short story she wrote for the class competition April was finally listened to, someone finally believed in her. The school did not publish her story they did something even better, they reported the poor care the DeRosier’s had been providing. Someone finally seen past that family’s fake attitude outside the home. Not long after a new social worker showed up unexpectedly to the DeRoiser’s home and saw the lifestyle they had been providing for their foster children. That day April was finally removed from the home, once and for …show more content…

Throughout her life she would not accept who she was or where she came from. She pushes to be accepted as white which she was with this she distanced herself more and more from her heritage. This intensified when she met Bob, who she married not long after meeting each other. He gave her the life she dreamt about her whole life. This included money a house and most of all love. However the love turned out to be a false love, it was just a ruse to get back at his interfering mother. This gave her a taste of the lifestyle she craved most her whole life, oblivious of his actions at first but she soon finds out. Their divorce makes her stronger and more independent. She soon moved home to look after her baby sister, who she had become to understand less every day. With April trying to mother her it pushed Cheryl further and further away from her, she could not understand the situation. But little did she know that just like herself her sister had dark and gloomy secrets as

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