Playing Beatie Bow Analysis

Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park Ruth Park is the author who wrote Playing Beatie Bow in 1980. Ruth Park was born in New Zealand, but settled and married in Australia, where she was inspired by the environment around her. This story is one that meant for an older, more young adult aged, children due to the maturity needed to comprehend the significance of the time travel and the relationships presented throughout the main character’s physical, emotional and mental journey. It also happens to be a lengthy story that younger children, with notoriously short attention spans, might lose interest in. It stays within the children’s literature realm because it centers around a young, female character. In this case, though, the parental units play pivotal …show more content…
The adults, throughout this story, act as push or pull factors for our main character; the adults directly affect the main character’s actions and/or guide her along the way. Though this book exists as part of the time travel fantasy genre; its true theme lies within the concept or role of family and is very much a coming-of-age story for the main character. The story of Beatie Bow would not be worth reading in a college literature class, thirty-six years after being put to paper if it did not have the added component of family and love infused in every aspect of the story. A fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Abigail Kirk is the main character of Playing Beatie Bow. The reader first meets Abigail as a young, Australian girl living in Sydney around 1970s, maybe the 1980s. Abigail is your quintessential loaner, teenager having no friends to speak of. We quickly learn that this is a result of her father leaving her mother and her for another woman four years prior to