Scotnotes Study Guides
2 total works
Janice Galloway's novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing is a study of a woman, Joy Stone, overcome by grief, guilt, and self-hatred. Narrated by Joy herself, her life is agonisingly observed, taking the reader through a dark descent into a striking portrait of mental illness. Even so, the novel is laced with humour, and ultimately hope, as Joy gradually learns to begin to forgive, and understand, herself. Gillian Sargent's SCOTNOTE unpicks the threads of this close-worked and intricately crafted novel, explaining issues of narrative style and outlining the novel's themes and symbolisms in an accessible and comprehensible fashion.
Rona Munro’s 1991 play Bold Girls is a tale of four Belfast women during the Troubles, exploring personal and communal history, and what it means when aspects of a community – ideologies, relationships, and spaces, for example – are threatened. Despite being set in a very specific time and place, the themes are universal: how societies are warped by male violence, dominance, and social privilege, and female subservience to that behaviour. Bold Girls is a case-study of the victims – rather than the perpetrators – of conflict: an unsentimental portrait of women’s lives under psychological siege.
Gillian Sargent’s Scotnote Study Guide provides a comprehensive overview to the characters and themes of Munro’s play, as well as its artistic and cultural influences, and is an excellent guide for senior school pupils and teachers alike.