Somewhere Around the Corner

963 Words4 Pages
A better world is possible but you first have to imagine it. The award winning novel, Somewhere around the Corner, written by Jackie French, is about a girl name Barbara who had a difficult family life. When Barbara is caught up in a wild demonstration in 1994, she begins to imagine a better world, around the corner, and travels back to the year 1934, the height of the Great Depression. Barbara is then found by a boy name Young Jim, and welcomed openly into his family. When Barbara tells the people of Poverty Gully of her story, they too start wondering if a better world is possible, somewhere around the corner. The dreams and goals of the characters Barbara, Gully Jack and Big Jim were all different and they all had different ways of achieving them. Barbara dreamt of a better world where a caring family would be there to love her. Her mother was a drug addict and didn’t provide Barbara with a safe home that she desperately needed. So Barbara fled into the streets only to be caught up in a wild demonstration, feeling more frightened than she had ever been before. Just as the police were coming towards her, the words of the old man Barbara had found in the demonstration flooded her mind, “Around the corner would be different. Around the corner would be safe. Away from bodies, screams and terror, away from the despair that had been home,” (p. 5). Her dream came to reality when she travelled around the corner and met the O’Reillys who loved and cared for her a in a way her mother hadn’t. Barbara felt safe, with the O’Reillys; they were the loving, caring family Barbara never had. Ma tells Barbara in the story, “’It doesn’t matter where you’re from, love. You’re safe here now. You’re one of us now,’” (p. 62). Barbara didn’t mind that the O’Reilys were living in shacks and didn’t have proper bathrooms. For all she cared, a family was all she had ever dreamt of. Later
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