Life's Challenges

In Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta, the main character, Josie faces many challenges that she has to cope with throughout the course of the novel. She struggles with finding her identity between the two cultures of Italian and Australian and faces racial discrimination and prejudice as a result of her heritage. Josie does not feel accepted at the private school she attends as her race and socio-economic standing result in bullying from other girls at the school. She also has to face the emotional turmoil that occurs when her friend, John Barton, takes his own life and when her estranged father who she has never known returns back into her life and the issues surrounding her illegitimacy. Josie is greatly impacted by the challenges that she has to face and utilises different coping strategies to help her get through it all, some of which are effective, some of which are not.

In the novel, the first problem Josie has to cope with is that she is bullied by the girls at the elitist private school she attends because of her race and the fact that she is a scholarship student. Jose suffers racism at the school, with the girls calling her "wog" and she is ostracized from the majority of her year as a result. This impacts the way Jose performs at school and how she interacts with her peers. As a result of bigotry and prejudice Jose only has a select few friends at her school. She is lead to feel ashamed of her heritage and wonder why she cannot be like the rest of the girls, her Italian culture clashes with the Australian identity, with her being unable to fit in in either groups of society, resulting in an identity crisis. The way Josie is led to feel inadequate impacts the way she is involved in her family structure, she constantly avoids family occasions and parties and lashes out at her grandmother and mother as she tries to disown her Italian heritage. Josie copes with this situation in a number of ineffective and effective ways. She rebels against her mother and the school constantly; talking back to teachers, skipping school and continuously breaking the rules. This strategy is proven ineffective as the side effects of these actions prove to be detrimental; her mother and the teachers at the school loose respect for her and she consequently does not get the position of school captain as well. Another coping strategy Josie enlists is to confront the girls bulling her on their racist remarks and attitudes, the is also ineffective as it just results in Josie getting in trouble because she lacks conflict solving attributes and she approaches the girls with hostility and an argument on her mind. This has an outcome of violence, in which Josie breaks a girl's nose with a science textbook, obviously this, once again, gets Josie in more trouble and is an ineffectual coping strategy. However, Josie does have an effective coping strategy that she uses in this particular situation, which is to put all of her effort into her school work, although this strategy does not have the best intentions (she wants to beat the bullies in the HSC) it does have positive consequences because she gets good school grades and begins to ignore the girls and "earn" her place at the school in their eyes. Eventually, Josie makes peace with the girls who bully her at the end of her HSC year when they connect of the shared turmoil of their friend, John Barton's death.

The issue of suicide and the reactions of people towards it are explored in Looking for Alibrandi. When John Barton commits suicide through an overdose of prescription medication it has many impacts on Josie, who was one of his best friends. The effects that happen to Josie after his death include; when she first hears the news Josie goes into a state of denial, she won't believe John is dead. After this, when the realization that he is dead sets in, Josie vomits and