Letters from the Inside by John Marsden

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Response # 3 Title of text: ‘Letters from the Inside’ Author of text: John Marsden Text type: Extended text Theme: ‘surviving what life can throw at you’ 1. Our theme is surviving what life can throw at you. Explain how your text shows this theme, refer to 3 specific examples. The story ‘Letters from the Inside’ by John Marsden shows surviving what life can throw at you in several ways. The first is how Mandy experiences violence within her own household from her older brother, Steve. Steve is a disturbing teenage boy who has no friends and has turned into a weapon freak. He is very abusive and violent towards Mandy, beating her up when no one is at home. We know that Mandy is afraid of that part of Steve’s nature that he can’t control, when she says “you know the most frightened thing in my life is Steve”, yet she has no one she can turn to, for help. Mandy’s parents are “working their lives away” and do not realise the extent of the problem and suggest it is “only a phase” that Steve is going through. Mandy starts locking her door and turns to Tracey, for help, because she seems to be the only one giving Mandy her full attention. The second example is that through a series of letters, Mandy and Tracey became pen pals. But the fact they were two strangers at first and that one writer had no real knowledge of the other, it made it easier for one to make up a story to hide her past, things that should not be remembered. And this is what happened in the story, even though Mandy and Tracey had become close friends, Tracey had been lying about her real life, since her first letter to Mandy. Eventually Mandy finds out that there is something strange about Tracey’s letters when she says, ‘You said, a long time back, that your parents have been married for twenty-five years. Now you say your father died after you were born’ Tracey stops writing. It is so

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