Adeline's Dream - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The narrative follows the story of twelve-year-old Adeline Mueller as she moves with her mom and five-year-old brother to Canada from their German home to move in with her father to start a new life. Adeline has not seen her father since she was eight and she is expecting a great and wonderful life in Canada from the description in the letters she has received from her father. But Adeline's relationship with her father has been strained ever since he left her and the rest of the family to move to Saskatchewan. Her father worked in a bank in Germany and then, after being fired, decided to find a better life for the rest of the family in Saskatchewan. Finally Adeline's father had reported that he has started a splendid new life for the family. The book begins with Adeline, her mother, and her brother Konrad traveling by steamship and then by train from Germany to Saskatchewan. The family then arrives at Qu'Appelle. When Adeline arrives, the truth is revealed.

Adeline's father now works on a farm bagging flour and doing the accounts which does not make enough money to provide a home. So the family lives in a soddle made of grass and earth. All her life Adeline had dreamed that one day she would be a singer but she feels that because her father has brought her into these horrible conditions, that her dream will be ruined making their relationship even more strained. Adeline soon learns that the richer townspeople do not take kindly to the immigrants that move to the area. But through all the prejudice, Adeline makes two friends, Kat and Henery, who are also immigrants. Kat helped Adeline fight off prejudiced bullies at their school.

One day the farm where her father was employed is burned down and her father is forced to get a new job. Kat's family moves and Adeline is left to fight the bullies, especially a girl named Sarah: a girl who sings just like Adeline and takes her solo in the Christmas play. By the time of the play, Adeline has begun to get along with her father and Sarah allows Adeline to have the solo at the play and Adeline's dreams start to come true.

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