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
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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
In college, a handsome young lad holding the name Ben Blake, seems to fancy Francie as they go on various study dates. He helps her cram for college entrance exams. Though she fails the first time, she later tries again and gets accepted into Michigan University that Ben chose for her to apply. Meanwhile, Katie receives a gift of $1,000.00 from Mc Shane, which she later uses for Francie’s college money, and a gift to Evy- $200.00. Laurie Nolan gets her last name changed to Mc Shane. The Nolans move from their humble apartment flat to the rich Mc Shane house. Neeley grows older and Francie can’t help but notice he is so alike to Johnny.
She smoothes over Sofia's betrayal of the family, her running away and fighting with her father, by calling it lucky that she ended up with such a loving husband and a beautiful blonde baby. Her story about the thieves who got caught the night Sofia was born similarly reflects her desire to look on the brighter side of things. She needs this positive attitude to craft positive family stories out of unfortunate events.
She carried that around with her all alone, not wanting to share her problems. And I knew about it! Well, not the part about mother committing suicide. So many lies to protect, and in the end they destroy anyway.” (Culleton 164) Cheryl’s mind was stressed with all the problems. In addition to the birth of a child, she suffered from Alcoholism, financial instability and prostitution. Yet, she wanted to protect her older sister from these issues. She never really took the time to ask her sister to help her. Cheryl took all the pressure on her shoulders: “So April Raintree, you think you got all the answers, eh? But you can’t tell me nothing, can you? Because in reality, you know zilch. I’m the one who knows what life is really about. Me. That’s who. I got the answers. I found the answers all by myself. You lied to me and I lied to you.”(Culleton 159) Cheryl’s reactions towards her sister prove that she lived in frustration. The only time she let her feelings out was when she was drunk. All the other time, she kept them all inside. She never really agreed to talk with April in day time either. The first time Cheryl talks about her feelings to April was in the last letter she wrote before committing suicide. “April there should be at least a little joy in living and when there is no joy, and then we become the living dead. And I can’t live this living death any longer. To drink myself to sleep, day in and day out” (Culleton 184) These
April Raintree, a beautiful twenty-four year old Metis woman whom tells a story of her and her younger sister’s lives as small children going from foster home to foster home and growing into mature adults. April comes from a Metis heritage, and as she grows up and starts to understand what her heritage is about she turns and becomes ashamed and bitter about being from this aboriginal heritage. April had a heritage of mixed nationalities, therefore she was Metis, the term was more known as a “half-breed” as they would call its back then. Being Metis, April would expect to look Metis also, but she inherited a lighter skin color from her mother. April Raintree, despite the difficulty she went through in her childhood years, she came off as a happy person, someone you could go to for any type of advice, help, or just need a general talk with someone who listens.
In this both heart wrenching and slightly humorous memoir, successful journalist Jeannette Walls tells the bittersweet story of her rather dysfunctional and poverty stricken upbringing. Walls grows up in a family trailed by the ubiquitous presence of hunger and broken down homes. Throughout the memoir she recounts memories of moving from one dilapidated neighborhood to another with her three other siblings, insanely "free sprinted" mother, and incredibly intelligent yet alcoholic father. The author focuses on her unconventional childhood with somewhat unfit parents much too lazy and self-absorbed to even obtain decent jobs. Although Walls's childhood gushes with heartbreaking tales of searching through dumpsters for food, she remains as
came to her door, the manifestation of her nightmares came as well. Being cognizant of
In the memoir Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, Ashley did an outstanding job at showing me the challenges of foster care that I was not aware of. Throughout the whole memoir, Ashley has difficult things thrown at her that a girl her age shouldn’t and wouldn’t have known how to handle on her own. Ashley was taken away from her mother at only 3 years old, spending almost 10 years inside Florida’s foster care and was shuffled between 14 different homes, some quite abusive, before she was adopted at age 12 from a Children’s Home.
She looks forward to moving away like others in her town. She admits she will not be missed at her job and at nineteen, without the former protection of her older brothers, she is beginning to feel "herself in danger of her father's violence.” This danger she sees is taken away when she meets her suitor, the sailor, Frank who promises her a better life away from these hardships she has faced.
As the story progresses, Riley and her family move from Minnesota to San Francisco, where Riley experiences culture shock. She and her family find their home to be more than a bit worn and dismal. To make matters worse, their furniture has become lost in the cross-country move, and Riley’s father is experiencing stress and anxiety in his job at a startup firm. Riley is uncomfortable at her new school and in her new social environment as a whole. Riley’s mother urges her to keep smiling, stay happy, and be there for her father. At first the emotions are able work together, keeping Riley in harmony. However, Sadness begins to cloud Riley’s memories and feelings and override her balanced personality. She tells Joy, “Something’s wrong with me. I think I’m having a breakdown.” Joy attempts to take Sadness out of
April's feels depressed and suffocated in her life with Frank. Her marriage, her average suburban life, and her crushed dreams of "what could have been" all add to April's feelings of entrapment. When Frank and April decide to move to Paris and leave their mundane lives behind April finds renewed hope and purpose, both of which she lacks in her ordinary, suburban life with her husband. In a lot of ways, Frank and April remind each other of the people they want to be and how far away each one is from being that person. April's pregnancy makes it so that the couple and their family never can go to Paris and therefore never become the people they so desperately want to be. April does not know that Frank becomes disillusioned to the idea of Paris
Each of the women face hardships with family, life in general, and men. Antonia a young, Bohemian girl is faced with many challenges and hardships throughout her life. After the death of her father, Antonia is obliged to start living by working in the fields alongside the men. Every member in her family depends on her both physically and emotionally. “With the death of her father, Antonia is forced to work on the family farm for her family to survive, and this shift in her role sparks a change in her identity. Antonia now wears some of her father’s belongings to suggest that she has indeed moved into a role that her father was supposed to play” (Everton). Antonia’s brother, Ambroch, makes use of her abilities as much as he can. When she works out on the fields he profits from the cash that she earns because he is the man of the household. “Antonia worked as a hired girl at the Cutters, and she was worried about Cutter’s intentions towards her. The moneylender, Wick Cuter, was known in Black Hawk as stingy towards his customers and over friendly to young girls . . . . Wick’s wife needed to go to Omaha for the weekend, and as a result of Wick’s infidelity she forced him to go with her. Although it seemed that Wick had left with his wife, Antonia still feared his intentions and pleaded with Jim to stay the night at the Cutters in her place . . . during the
Experiencing further unstable environments, these children are forced to move from one foster home to another. They rarely develop meaningful relationships and constantly endure lack of care and protection by adults. Sabreen, another gifted student, was able to excel in school despite her unstable environments. She, too, became a ward of the county battling to find a stable home, constantly being placed in unstable environments, environments that do not encourage any achievement. When her situation becomes untenable, she goes AWOL, like Olivia, refusing to return to county supervision. Corwin masterfully frames the problem that wards, like Olivia and Sabreen, face when they feel that going back into the system is not an option. The additional struggles can be seen through Olivia and Sabreen accepting jobs with long hours in order to make enough to pay their bills. The responsibility on taking care of themselves financially detracts from their studies, which quickly can become a vicious, never-ending cycle.
There are memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness. Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she'd even turned twenty. And that's when things got interesting.... You have in your hands the strange, heart-wrenching, and exhilarating tale of a woman named Cupcake. It begins as the story of a girl orphaned twice over, once by the death of her mother and then again by a child welfare system that separated her from her stepfather and put her into the hands of an epically sadistic foster parent. But there comes a point in her preteen years--maybe it's the night she first tries to run
All of the characters show a form of love but in a way all of their love is flawed. There cannot be love without a little bit of greed. Even when we believe that the couple’s love is true, we realize that the hero is not the hero of the story. I believe that if the daughter had had a better relationship with her father, she could’ve just told him that the man she met was the man she wanted to marry. Instead, she tries to make her father happy at her own expense.
Even though her mother was a light skin black woman, she did not want to live her life as a lie, by living as a white woman. Her mother embraced her blackness, which forced her to find work as a maid; her employers did not treat her with the same dignity as a white woman would receive. After seeing what her mother went through for accepting her blackness and living her life as a black woman, she knew that was not the life she wanted to live.