“The part of us that has to be burned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but… what we are meant to be” (Dekker 1). This is the quote the authors choose as a preface to the story, which I believe fits perfectly with the theme about acceptance of the darker side of your personality. All teenager Janeal Mikkado wants is to leave her gypsy home, and heritage, behind and make a life for herself. Lifetime criminal Salazar Sanso apprehends her and coerces her into a deal - he will spare Janeal's father, who is making a deal with the DEA, if Janeal can find the $1 million her father is hiding. This leads to a fiery confrontation, which transforms
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This is attributed to our corresponding personalities, a single trait being both of us don’t enjoy owning up to our own mistakes. No one likes to be confronted with his or her own faults and wrongdoings, and as is explained in the novel, Janeal deals with this by not dealing with it at all, by choosing to run away. Correspondingly, I can more than affiliate with Janeal’s desire to leave home and family behind in hopes of embarking on something bigger; that universal theme of the teenage years that “home has long been seen as a place to leave, rather than a place to live” (Leaving Home). If I was asked this same question as Janeal, “What would you do if you found a million dollars?”, I would most likely respond in a similar way, “ I’d go to Greece… and then I’d buy one of those new Mercedes, and I’d drive it to New York City” (Dekker & Healy 40). It seems the older you get, the more trapped you feel by the ghost-like hands of normalcy*, always looking ahead with such impatience to do something with your life. Overall, I believe there to be a very distinguishable correlation between Janeal and …show more content…
One of the main questions I had was how the main plot twist- Janeal and Katie are the same person after the fire that killed Katie, just different aspects of Janeal’s personality in two different bodies- is at all plausible? An answer is never given to the readers, even as the novel comes to a close, and the closest thing to an explanation is “But I sensed something… supernatural happening” (Dekker & Healy 330). It wasn’t facile to come up with an explanation on my own, so I took to the Internet and researched parallels between Gypsy culture and religious miracles, which was like searching for a needle in a haystack the size Texas*. To no surprise, not a whole lot came up, but after a while I did find that some ancient Gypsy tribes did believe in the splitting of a soul, between two close friends or relatives. This does not fully explain the somewhat disorientating plot, but can serve as a means to make sense of some of it. An additional question I have for the authors is why did they choose to include such a huge time jump in the story, specifically in the beginning chapters? Usually skipping time for an epilogue of a book is normal, but not so much in the opening few chapters, and certainly not 15 years in the future, which made me wonder what had possessed the authors to choose such an uncommon practice. The only reason that made sense to me was that Dekker and
This is attributed to our corresponding personalities, a single trait being both of us don’t enjoy owning up to our own mistakes. No one likes to be confronted with his or her own faults and wrongdoings, and as is explained in the novel, Janeal deals with this by not dealing with it at all, by choosing to run away. Correspondingly, I can more than affiliate with Janeal’s desire to leave home and family behind in hopes of embarking on something bigger; that universal theme of the teenage years that “home has long been seen as a place to leave, rather than a place to live” (Leaving Home). If I was asked this same question as Janeal, “What would you do if you found a million dollars?”, I would most likely respond in a similar way, “ I’d go to Greece… and then I’d buy one of those new Mercedes, and I’d drive it to New York City” (Dekker & Healy 40). It seems the older you get, the more trapped you feel by the ghost-like hands of normalcy*, always looking ahead with such impatience to do something with your life. Overall, I believe there to be a very distinguishable correlation between Janeal and …show more content…
One of the main questions I had was how the main plot twist- Janeal and Katie are the same person after the fire that killed Katie, just different aspects of Janeal’s personality in two different bodies- is at all plausible? An answer is never given to the readers, even as the novel comes to a close, and the closest thing to an explanation is “But I sensed something… supernatural happening” (Dekker & Healy 330). It wasn’t facile to come up with an explanation on my own, so I took to the Internet and researched parallels between Gypsy culture and religious miracles, which was like searching for a needle in a haystack the size Texas*. To no surprise, not a whole lot came up, but after a while I did find that some ancient Gypsy tribes did believe in the splitting of a soul, between two close friends or relatives. This does not fully explain the somewhat disorientating plot, but can serve as a means to make sense of some of it. An additional question I have for the authors is why did they choose to include such a huge time jump in the story, specifically in the beginning chapters? Usually skipping time for an epilogue of a book is normal, but not so much in the opening few chapters, and certainly not 15 years in the future, which made me wonder what had possessed the authors to choose such an uncommon practice. The only reason that made sense to me was that Dekker and