How Lucky You Are

574 Words3 Pages
Debi Alper’s short story “How Lucky You Are” is about a boy named Max and his foreign (Iranian) crush Ishraqi, and about Max’s changing behavior towards his mother. The story takes place in London, Britain. Max first meets Ishraqi outside the Home Office, which is where they deal with immigration – refugees and asylum seekers. Ishraqi left Iran a year and a half ago, after both her parents were arrested at an anti-government demonstration. In the beginning of the story Max doesn’t appreciate the benefits he has. He doesn’t appreciate his family, mostly his mother, either. That leads us to the main theme of the short story “you should appreciate what you have”. In the beginning of the story did Max argue with both his mother and the drivel in school, but in the end he did actually receive more knowledge. Max thought about Ishraqi not even knowing if her parents existed, and then he resolved not to argue with his mom for once. The story is told by a third-person omniscient narrator, which is illuminated by the way none is mentioned with an “I”. All of the events are seen from Max’s point of view, and he is the character the story treats on all way through. The narrator describes Max’s come across with Ishraqi as a flashback, and comparable with this, is another switch in flashbacks back to Max’s childhood. Max’s father had left him and his mother already when he was a little boy. It definitely changes Max’s way of thinking in life; Firstly, he became more careless about how he treated his mother, because he realized that she really cared for him, and secondly, he became more careless about his school. He was creative, they said, so they tried selling him off with an offer of being a student in The Brit School in Croydon. Max just didn’t want to go, even though the school was a vast improvement on his old school and it was great not to wear a
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