Kate, Miles’s wife, serves as the novel’s deuteragonist and a foil to her husband. She’s a round, though relatively static, character defined by her ambition, practicality, and professional success. A tenured professor of English specializing in Milton and Blake, Kate is focused and driven, a stark contrast to Miles’s meandering intellectual pursuits. Her career provides the catalyst for the family’s move to Vermont, and her professional life is a constant, implicit measure against which Miles’s lack of progress is judged. Kate’s character is deepened by her history with MS, a disease that threatened her ability to work and live independently in her youth. This experience fuels her ambition, instilling in her a sense of urgency and appreciation for her intellectual and physical capabilities. While she has been in remission for years, the memory of her illness grounds her in reality and makes her less patient with Miles’s whimsical or unproductive detours.

Despite her frustrations with Miles, Kate is a loving and supportive partner who actively tries to help him find his way, even if her methods, like setting him up on a “friend date” with Andrei, are sometimes misguided. She’s a devoted mother who worries about the effects of their hyper-competitive Silicon Valley environment on her children, hoping that the move to the country will offer them a more balanced childhood. While she initially approaches rural life with the same practical mindset she applies to her career, she isn’t immune to the enchantments of her new home. Her brief fascination with the heroic Norwegian ski coach Bjorn is less a sign of marital discontent than a momentary indulgence in a romantic ideal of masculine competence. Her journey culminates in her involvement with the Jeremiah Wylkes Society after they rescue Olive. In their quest, she finds unexpected intellectual resonance with her own work on Milton and Blake, ultimately bridging the gap between her world and Miles’s.

As the children of Miles and Kate, Wesley and Olive are dynamic minor characters whose development reflects the novel’s central themes. Olive is imaginative and artistic, initially embracing The Romanticization of Rural Life with fantasies drawn from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her understanding of the country is complicated by real-world social dynamics, particularly her fraught friendship with the tough, worldly Harper. Olive’s connection to her father’s stories is central to her character; she believes in their magic but is also wounded when that belief is challenged, as when Harper mocks her for talking about the cave. Her eventual discovery of a real cave, spurred by her father’s tales, and her subsequent rescue become the key events of the novel, literally unearthing the story’s central myth.

Wesley is more skeptical and analytical, a quiet observer whose complex mind is best represented by Cosmos, the complex world-building game he plays. This game is a “blueprint of his child’s mind” (63), revealing his need to create order and logic in the universe. Initially a silent consumer of knowledge, Wesley develops into a budding investigative journalist for the school newspaper, channeling his curiosity into uncovering the truth about local mysteries like the Pineridge Farm. His pedantic corrections of adults, from the ski coach Bjorn to the nature guide Hugh, provide moments of comedy while establishing him as a voice of empirical fact in a world filled with myth and misinformation. Together, the children represent two different ways of engaging with the world: Olive through art and belief and Wesley through science and investigation.

Andrei is a key foil for Miles, a fellow displaced academic who shows a more decisive and committed version of Miles’s own existential crisis. With a PhD in biochemistry, Andrei suffered a “crisis” of faith in his scientific career after facing professional disappointment and the anonymity of adjunct teaching. He has found a spiritual and physical antidote to his melancholy in the preindustrial labor of scything, an activity he embraces with the same intensity he once applied to his research. This turn toward physical work embodies the novel’s exploration of Searching for Meaning in the Modern World, as Andrei seeks an authentic, tangible purpose to replace his failed intellectual ambitions. His idyllic orchard, however, is a satirical portrait of the difficulties of a return to nature; it’s secretly saved from pests not by his organic methods but by his wife’s covert hiring of a chemical-spraying arborist. Andrei’s eventual involvement with the Jeremiah Wylkes Society is a natural extension of his journey, representing a turn from scientific rationalism toward a more mystical, speculative way of understanding the world.

Bentley is an eccentric mentor figure for Miles and an embodiment of the novel’s interest in how individuals construct meaning. A mathematical genius who had a mental-health crisis in college, Bentley believes that he’s possessed by the ibbur, or benign spirit, of the historical Vermont snowflake photographer Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley. To defend the logic of his own seemingly delusional belief, he has dedicated his life to the massive, quixotic project of creating an “Encyclopedia of Foolish Errors” to catalog all of human folly (176), from pseudoscience to bad investments. This obsessive quest is his way of proving that the world is just as “mad” as it claims he is. Despite his eccentricities, Bentley is a kind, insightful, and knowledgeable man who becomes a source of both practical help and wisdom for Miles. He lives in a custom-outfitted ambulance filled with his card catalogs, a mobile library of unreason that symbolizes his unique worldview. Bentley has created his own logical system to make sense of a world he finds illogical, a thought process given credit when he’s the only one who recognizes that the family dog, Guiseppe, is trying to guide them to Olive when she’s lost in the novel’s climax.

Nausicaä is the new, young drama teacher at the elementary school and is a minor comedic and catalytic character. Dressed in theatrical costumes like velvet pumpkin breeches and a doublet, her primary role in the story is to offer Miles a fantasy of escape and a mild form of temptation. Her flirtatious nature and her subversive, eros-focused interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream represent a vitality and creative freedom that contrast with Miles’s own feelings of stagnation. While she’s a brief object of Miles’s mid-life anxieties, her direction of the school play is genuinely transformative, uniting the community and giving Miles a new sense of purpose as a parent volunteer, thus contributing to the theme of Finding Purpose and Community Through Storytelling.