Home of the American Circus

“I’ve read every one. Loved the books I didn’t even particularly like, because they felt like friends. They were better than people.”

Freya’s exit from her Maine apartment reveals that what she most values are her books, suggesting their importance in her imaginative life. That books have stood in for her friends reveals Freya’s loneliness and lack of connections to other people. Her character growth throughout the novel will entail reconnecting with and finding new people to add to her found family, illustrating the power of Forging Community and Family Ties.

“When I drove away, leaving her was the thing that broke my heart, because I loved every inch, every moment, of her being. I could look at her face and know she was feeling a way I’d felt, like we were the same kind of human.”

These images describe the strong sympathy and connection that Freya feels to Aubrey, the one piece of her biological family that she truly loves. Freya’s deep sense of loss over leaving Aubrey behind set up the stakes for the plot arc of reconnecting with Aubrey and winning back her trust.

“Maybe Somers turns my heart into a frog, like something out of a fairy tale passed down through storytellers, distorted over time, until I’m not even the princess, just the ugly stepsister with a heart that’s amphibial.”

This imagery of frogs and fairy tales indicates how Freya feels out of place in Somers; it’s a place that physically pains her, manifested by this strange behavior in her heart. The allusions to being turned into a frog and ugly stepsisters reveals how Freya feels her life is, if a fairy tale, then part of the darker, more frightening side of such stories.

“I used to feel like the only person in all of Somers who understood that a captive elephant is a tragedy.”

Freya’s sense of pity for Old Bet, the elephant who serves as the town’s mascot, reveals the vulnerabilities that Freya felt as a sensitive and frightened child. Throughout the novel, Old Bet serves both as a metaphor for Somers and as a symbol for Freya herself in her captivity and the abuse inflicted upon her.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to handle this house and their belongings, when everything is sacred and awful in the same turn.”

The house she inherits from Step initially represents the legacy left by her parents that Freya doesn’t want, and the house’s state of disrepair reflects to Freya both the precarious state of her current life and evidence of the neglect and lack of care during her childhood. As a representation of her parents, however, the house will gradually become a symbol for Freya’s journey toward healing, which entails coming to terms with the emotional wounds her parents inflicted on her and embracing The Importance of Interrupting Cycles of Abuse.

“I didn’t even want a rat. I just couldn’t stand that no one was taking care of him. I don’t know if I’m the best for him, but I’m better than what he had.”

Aubrey’s motivation for stealing Lenny Juice, the rat, reflects The Human Need for Nurturance. In the early half of the book, when the obstacles to Freya’s recovery are significant, her gestures of care for Lenny foreshadow her ability to heal and cope, a character journey that Aubrey is undertaking as well.

“I touch my forehead to my knees. It feels like I’m five years old again, hiding from my sister in my bedroom closet. I never felt like this in Maine.”

Freya’s physical reaction when she hears Steena’s voice in the grocery store reflects the effects of the lack of safety and emotional trauma she experienced in her relationship with her sister: She affects the fetal position as a self-protective stance. As Freya comes to feel more at home in herself, she will cease to fear Steena and instead feel sympathy for her similar emotional wounds, reflecting The Importance of Interrupting Cycles of Abuse.

“How am I supposed to stand here and tell her I’m good for her, that she should want to spend time with me, when I’m not sure I’m good for anyone?”

Freya’s uncertainty about trying to reconnect with Aubrey the first winter she returns to Somers reflects her fear that she is damaged and doesn’t deserve Aubrey’s love or trust. However, Freya’s love for Aubrey proves the core of her character and becomes an anchor for Freya’s own emotional growth and recovery.

“I always think what I want must be wrong—that other people know better and do better than me. I thought letting Aubrey stay would be selfish because I wanted her to.”

Learning that Aubrey is being bullied at school and has been living at Step’s house because Steena kicked her out is a revelation for Freya and a turning point in the plot of the book. As well as being a climactic conclusion and a cliffhanger ending to Part 1, this realization forces Freya to realize that Aubrey actually needs Freya’s efforts at companionship and care-taking. This helps reknit their relationship and propels Freya’s character arc of growth and healing.

“I don’t know how I’m going to carry Aubrey three years into the future—to the day when she’s finally free to walk away from all this—if everything could fall apart in five minutes.”

Freya begins making repairs to her house around the same time she takes over being an informal guardian and caregiver for Aubrey. Both moves contribute to her character growth and maturation, while her protectiveness toward Aubrey speaks to the novel’s themes about The Human Need for Nurturance. Freya’s image of carrying Aubrey, rather than her own memories or baggage or scars, shows the turn to hopefulness in Part 2.

“[The stars] change everything. They make that wall mine and Aubrey’s and Shray’s too. There’s an urge growing like a crack in my mind that knows exactly how it wants to be patched, and nobody is here to tell me no.”

Freya’s repairs to the house become a way for her to deal with her memories and process the emotional abuse and neglect she felt as a child; in reclaiming the house as her own space, she is reclaiming her sense of self. Making room for her own art as well as Aubrey and Shray’s shows Freya in the initial stages of building her own sense of Forging Community and Family Ties.

“The stakes never felt very high. I’d be okay or I wouldn’t, and I didn’t care much, because no one else did either. But Aubrey has to be okay, which means I have to be okay too.”

The ice storm provides an emotional turning point in the novel when Freya realizes how invested she is in protecting Aubrey, and her fear about preserving the house are an extension of her concern about preserving herself so she can provide care and protection for Aubrey. Needing to care for someone else motivates Freya’s maturity and signals her growth as a character.

“Kids don’t need a life where nothing bad ever happens. What they need is someone who’s there for them when the bad stuff happens.”

Bee, Freya’s former friend who unconditionally loves and accepts her, serves the role as guide and mentor as well as supporting key plot moments. When the leak in the house feels like a setback to Freya’s efforts at repair, Bee shares this wisdom about resilience, furthering the novel’s thematic exploration of The Human Need for Nurturance.

“I can’t decide if I’m proud of Step for working toward his goal or devastated that he found the courage to stand up for his dream when he never figured out how to stand up for me.”

Part of her work of emotional healing when she returns to Somers, for Freya, is confronting the ways her parents failed as parents but understanding their complexity as human beings. Step’s ambition to hike the Appalachian Trail reveals an ambition Freya never knew he had, but it also reveals his intention to leave her and her mother. Freya’s adoption of the plan of hiking the trail as a way to demonstrate her own strength shows how she has chosen to forge her own path, free of the example that her parents set.

“I’m not living my life waiting for the end of something—I am living in my life.”

At the beginning of Part 3, Freya’s experience of being present in her life contrasts with the physical and emotional woundedness that dogged her in Parts 1 and 2. This movement charts the novel’s larger dramatic arc from misfortune to fortune, following Freya’s path of recovery and reconnection.

“I thought about what they’d lost, how they’d built their town thinking it would last forever, how painful it is to learn that nothing ever does.”

The reservoir, for Freya, holds rare memories of happy times taking walks with Step, but it also provides a haunting image with the story she recalls of the residents forced to move when the land was flooded. This motif of loss provides an undercurrent to much of Freya’s happiness in Somers, adding a somber tone even to the happy moments in the novel.

“I’ve avoided her garden because I’m afraid it will be too difficult to care for and I’ll learn more than I want to about the texture of her hardships.”

Freya regards her mother’s garden as an extension and reflection of her mother and at first avoids the insight she believes she would gain into her mother’s character if she spent time in this place her mother cared for. By Part 3, Freya is able to confront the garden and be a witness to her mother’s efforts as well as failures, showing that she is making progress in healing from her childhood trauma and navigating The Importance of Interrupting Cycles of Abuse.

“I lose time when I carve, the day fading before I realize I haven’t eaten, I have to pee, and the glass of water I brought downstairs with me hours ago is still completely full.”

Freya’s love of and skill for carving is a talent she discovers when she returns to the house and finds her great-grandfather Vili’s old wood-working tools. These images of losing time describe her being in a state of flow, when an artist is caught up in the act of creation. The connection to Vili’s work is a connection to her heritage, since she felt accepted or loved by her grandparents. Freya’s discovery of art signals the new aspects of her character that are unfolding as she matures over the course of the novel.

“The look on his face makes me think that he also believed we were only ever one brave moment away from being together. Now we know it’s not true.”

Part 4 is full of revelations, including the moment Jam and Freya give in to their attraction and realize the romantic fantasy they both had about the other is not going to come true. This turning point is one of many reckonings that presses Freya to think about her future instead of staying caught up in the moment, and this, too, influences her character arc.

“I’ve spent so much time in my life worrying that my family might not have been bad enough to justify walking away. I never thought about how they weren’t good enough to keep me happy and healthy and here.”

In caring for Aubrey and trying to give her a normal life, Freya revisits her feelings about her family and slowly comes to terms with the guilt and self-blame she felt over leaving. In thinking about the care Aubrey deserves, Freya becomes conscious of what she needed, and didn’t get, as a young person, speaking to The Importance of Interrupting Cycles of Abuse.

“She treats me like the earnest, careful nine-year-old I used to be—as if that girl is a fact—and it connects me to the core of myself.”

One of the important relationships that Freya is able to reclaim when she returns to Somers is her friendship with Bee, her childhood friend. As this passage illustrates, that connection gives Freya a sense of continuity with her childhood self and a sense of a lasting part of her identity, one that has not been fragmented by trauma. Bee serves as a foil for Freya and also demonstrates the novel’s themes of The Human Need for Nurturance in her care for Freya and Aubrey.

“Somers is a beautiful town. An achingly beautiful, quaint little town that has fought hard to cling to what makes it special even as everything changes.”

In Part 5, Freya begins to think about her place in the world and her future as she plans out her next steps with Aubrey. The Christmas tree lighting ceremony provides this moment where she comes to terms with what Somers means to her, as well as the acknowledgement that this will not be her future home. This realization reflects her character arc of making peace with her past.

“If the elephant is a statue and a powerful mascot, if the captor is a hometown hero, a champion, an innovator, we don’t have to reconcile the cruelty and the crime. If the elephant is just a symbol, we don’t have to care about her heart. But we should.”

Throughout the novel, the intertwined excerpts from Freya’s history report on Old Bet provide an evolving speculation on the power of symbol and myth. Old Bet emerges as the victim of a crime for which justice has never been done, much like Freya feels about Charlie’s assault. For Freya and the novel at large, the image of Old Bet reckons with the harm done by humans to innocent creatures for which they are never held accountable or punished.