To What Extent Does Melina Marchetta Successfully Portray Teenage Girls in Saving Francesca?

Q: to what extent does Melina Marchetta successfully portray teenage girls in saving Francesca?

Melina Marchetta’s 2003 novel Saving Francesca is about a teenage girl in year 11 named Francesca, who has moved to an all-boys school that had recently opened its doors to girls. To a great extent Melina Marchetta successfully portrays a teenage girl throughout this novel as she experiences all of the emotions that a typical teenager would go through such as confusion, love, and friendship. Marchetta’s novel also portrays a teenager successfully as she explains the struggles that year 11 girls would be exposed to, such as parties, and romance (first crush) and drinking. Marchetta successfully portrays a teenager through this book by writing about Francesca’s struggles with her friends.

To a great extent Marchetta successfully portrays a teenage girl throughout the novel ‘Saving Francesca’ by expressing the feeling that a typical teenage girl would experience such as, confusion, love, friendship, stress, humiliation, and fear. Marchetta expresses the feelings of stress, fear and confusion through the novel by using a variety of words and sentences that help the reader connect to Francesca by showing emotions that many females have experienced throughout their teenage years. One example of Francesca expressing her feelings is in the following quote, "The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenceless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable.” this quote expresses how Francesca feels about her life and about her mother. Francesca had believed that if she told the truth about her mother and said it aloud she would have had a weight lifted off of her shoulders, but instead she had felt worse than before as she felt even more humiliated, awkward, and defenceless.

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