Emerson Hung/Staff reporter
The main theme of the story was about how mental trauma easily impacts people, and the author used conversations between Trisha and Robyn to bring out the theme of her thoughts on the story.
What does the story tell about?
“You Can Run” is a novel about the growth of two main characters Trisha Hanover and Robyn Hanover.
The novel “You Can Run” was written by Norah McClintock, an author a Canadian writer who only wrote books about young adult fiction and published more than 60 books. She won five Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence.
Plot of the story
Robyn was one of the story protagonists, who working on a history project with a girl called Trisha Hanover, who was also the story protagonist had mental issues that would run away from problems she couldn’t solve, Trisha usually run away for one or two days and got sent back by the police who saw her hanging around at night, but since Robyn did something mean to Trisha while they working on the history project.
This caused Trisha to run away again, but nobody could find Trisha at this time, and she had already been lost for 5 days, Trisha’s mom was sick for a while and Trisha’s stepfather felt hopeless, so they found Robyn’s father who was a cop before and requested him to find Trisha.
During the request to Robyn’s father, Robyn also decided to find out where Trisha was since she thought she was the one who caused the occurrence and wanted to be responsible for it.
Although Robyn had gotten into some serious trouble with a gangster group named “Skeleton Masks” while searching for clues about Trisha, many friends and family members of Robyn joined the search to assist Robyn.
At last, all gang members get arrested by the police and Robyn finds out where Trisha is, and they start to have a long talk.
After the talk, Trisha forgave what Robyn said, and said thank you to Robyn for things she did for Trisha, and they continued to work on the history project.
My review
Other than the topic of “how mental trauma easily impacts people, McClintock also developed 3 topics in the story.
The first topic developed by McClintock was “Relationships”, it made the story important since the main factor that made Trisha run away from problems was her relationship with her mom. Since Trisha’s father passed away from a sudden heart attack, Trisha’s mom tried to replace her husband by re-married, which caused a huge amount of dissatisfaction from Trisha, and she started to run away to show that she wouldn’t even admit the stepfather as her father. Also, the relationship between Robyn and Trisha was a main factor in starting the story.
The second topic that McClintock developed was “Regret”, Trisha’s stepfather and mom realized why Trisha kept running away. They started to regret the re-marry that they had, but they had no other choices, so they always tried to communicate or do some activities with her to fix the relationship between them. Also, Robyn always regretted things she did to Trisha since Robyn thought she was the one who made Trisha run away and was lost for 5 days.
The last topic that McClintock developed was “Purpose“, most characters in this story were doing things on purpose. For example, Trisha wants to avoid mental damage, so she keeps running away from problems. Trisha’s moms did not want to feel lonely after her husband died, so she planned to remarry with another man. Robyn thought she caused the occurrence of Trisha’s missing, so she tried to find Trisha by herself.
Final Recommendation
Overall, I will recommend audiences who are developing their English skills read “You Can Run”. Since it’s easy to understand conversations that make the audience can easily summarize the plot of the story, and all the chapters were short.
Besides that, the novel “You Can Run” is mainly targeted towards people who want to know about psychology and inference. The target also includes teenage readers and readers who enjoy behavior analysis.
Resource
Information of Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence
Information of Norah McClintock
Information of You Can Run
Images