Plot overview — Anita and Me — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Plot overview
Introduction
What you need to know
The whole novel in brief, part by part: about two years in Meena's life in Tollington, from the lie that starts the story to the eleven-plus and the family's move away.
Where the key moments fall, part by part, from Papa marching Meena to Mr Ormerod's shop in Chapter 1 and the fete at the end of Chapter 7 to Nanima's arrival in Chapter 8, Anita's visit in Chapter 10, the hospital in Chapter 12 and the eleven-plus at the end.
How the story begins with Meena protesting 'I'm not lying, honest, papa!' and ends with her sense that 'The place in which I belonged was wherever I stood'.
The moments OCR has printed for comparison: Meena's seventh-birthday car journey (2023), her run for help when Tracey falls into the pond (2024) and Meena with Mama in the kitchen (2025), and earlier the car at the traffic lights (2022), Meena feeding Sunil (2021) and a moment when Meena feels betrayed by her best friend (the specimen paper).
The themes OCR then set for another moment: childhood memorably described (2023), someone memorably described (2024) and how Meena's family differs from others in Tollington (2025).
Choosing the other moment: OCR's examiners found that most answers on this novel in 2024 and 2025 reused the printed passage for the second part, which earns nothing, so prepare several other moments, each with a few short quotations.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
