Abduction by Shelagh Delaney

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The short story ’Abduction’ was written by Shelagh Delaney and published in 2002. It mainly takes place in London, but we also hear about a suburb to Manchester. On the last page it mentions ‘Millennium Eve’ so I think it’s safe to say that most of the story takes places in 1999. It’s a first-person narrator, but it’s only in the first few lines that it actually matters, because after that, the narrator is retelling a story. The narrator is one of the other main-character’s older siblings, we know that because in the very last line of the first page, it says: “He’d been born late in our parents’ marriage”, which must mean that the narrator is a part of the family. The two main characters of the story are Ann and her brother. Ann is a very successful woman. She has achieved all her personal goals like becoming a paediatrician, earning lots and lots of money, having an active social life, and a lovely house in London. One day she returns home and ‘kidnaps’ her younger brother, though it’s not really a kidnapping because the brothers is more than willing to come with her, but who can blame him? He’s just a normal teenager who doesn’t know what he wants, and most teens would pick a fun life in London over a boring life in a suburb. She promises him a future and money, who would say no to that? After getting him to London she completely takes over his life and becomes like an overprotective mother. She tells him what to do, gives him an allowance, buys his clothes, and finds him a job. He lets her do everything even though he doesn’t want any of it. He never learns to take care of himself or stand up for himself, which is normally what you do when you’re a teenager, but even when he gets a job, she still gives him an allowance, and she even continues to do so when he moves out and in with his pregnant girlfriend. Throughout the whole story she’s sure that she
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