April Raintree Character Analysis

The characters April and Cheryl in the novel In Search of April Raintree struggled with identity and what constitutes for a meaningful life their whole lives. At the beginning of this novel we read about the early beginning of these two siblings and the lives they lived together with their biological family. You learn about the racism and discrimination that they had dealt with at such an early age. Cheryl was a bit too young to remember any of these encounters, but April remembered and envied the white-skinned kids because she could distinguish the difference between the two different heritages. "There were two different groups of children that went to the park. One group was the brown-skinned children who looked like Cheryl in most ways. Some of them came …show more content…
April and Cheryl were in the foster care system ever since they were young kids. April had suffered a lot in the foster care homes that she was put into because she always got put into homes in which the families had no love towards her and tease her about the places that she had been brought up from. After being belittled it was is hard for her to distinguish what was most important for her in her life. She wanted to run away from what she thought was a bad way of living even so much to pretend that was wasn’t native when she had met new people. It wasn’t just April that had suffered from these brutal experiences of victimization 's from the people around her but Cheryl as she got older experienced a lot for herself, she started drinking alcohol and became the stereotype that her sister had avoided all her life. “It seemed to me that what I’d read and what I’d heard indicated that Metis and Indians were inclined to be alcoholics” (In Search of April Raintree 48) is a statement in which April had read and heard about when she was younger setting her on the wrong path and state of mind of where she had come