Tween’s Resilience in the Face of Parental Divorce in Big and Little Questions (According to Wren Joe Byrd)

Abstract

This study investigates how contemporary American novel, Big and Little Questions (According to Wren Jo Byrd) (2017) represents the impact of parental divorce on the female tween’s resilience. The text is analyzed through Belsey's qualitative and interpretive textual-critical lens and guided by Ungar's socio-ecological theory of resilience. The study examines the divorce induced adversity, gaps, silences and binary oppositions and how the tween negotiates her relevant cultural resources to fill the gaps and silences and dismantle the binary oppositions to achieve resilience. This analysis reveals that the gaps and silences reveal unspoken cultural pressures and constrained resources which the tween fills culturally relevantly through self-reliance, metacognition, secrecy, confessions of parental divorce, relational validation of pain and her acceptance of two home reality. Likewise, she resolves the adversity of conflicting hierarchies through restructuring her concept of family and big and little things, fibbing, alienation, accepting divorce, externalizing her trauma through culturally relevant resources of diary and dictionary, and acknowledging parental, peer, and communal anchor. The study concludes that tween’s literature holds significant potential for illuminating the socio-ecological dimensions of resilience.

Keywords: Parental Divorce, tween’s adversity, Social-Ecology, Tween’s Resilience, cultural relevant resources, Middle Grade Fiction