“Often she felt like the real Miles was the boy weeping in darkness, giving off some kind of strange dream light, not this perfect one who was more like a boarder than a brother.”

The Fall siblings begin the book with Miles the odd man out, another version of the estrangement that prevails among the Fall brothers. The light that shows from Miles, a sign of his heritage as a descendent of Alonso Fall, also indicates the joyful person inside him who is waiting to be awakened by Cassidy and then Felix, illustrating the transformative effect that one person can have on another.

“The air was blazing and breathless even this early because of The Devil Winds. The whole valley felt like it was one spark away from bursting into flames.”

The name The Devil Winds—derived from the Diablo winds that occur in late summer and fall in California’s Bay Area—hints at the magical and personified properties that will later be associated with the town of Paradise Springs. In the first part, the heat wave and dryness add to the tension of the atmosphere, setting up the expectation of disaster. The environment will continue to react to and respond to the characters, evoking the sense that they live in an enchanted or mythical land.

“Something didn’t feel real. He’d get a similar feeling sometimes when reading became more like breathing and he knew he’d left real life and his soul had transferred from his body into the story.”

The novel is at its heart about transformations, and this passage comes when Miles, at his first meeting with Cassidy, feels transformed by his ability to trust and confide in her. The discussion of stories that allow entry into other worlds, or which themselves have magical properties, becomes a recurring theme.

“He still waited by the window, sometimes all day, staring down the long, tree-lined driveway. It was more than a habit, more like a spiritual practice. Looking off. Waiting. Hearing music played by no one.”

The novel explores The Effects of Parental Abandonment through the many characters that have been left by their parents. While this passage captures Wynton’s longing for his father, what he doesn’t know is that this longing connects him to the rest of his family, who all long for Theo.

“You see as you swim through time that your whole life has been about your father’s absence, about skin growing over a wound that never heals.”

This image captures Wynton’s feelings about his father’s abandonment, which is a continuing source of pain for him. The impacts of abandonment and lasting grief are central themes of the novel.

“I never want her to know that a life is an abandoned unfinished story.”

The power of stories is a recurring theme in the novel, examined from several angles. In this passage, from one of Bernadette’s unsent letters, she takes a dismal view of human lives as being nothing like stories. This poses a contrast to other, more hopeful instances where characters imagine their lives like a fairy tale or fable.

“She’s doing that thing she does to me, turning him into brightness […] But the strange thing is, it appears he’s doing it to her as well. I feel like I’m watching two stars explode into supernovas.”

This image of light and brightness when someone is happy or excited appears here to describe Marigold’s attraction to Dave Caputo, but similar imagery appears elsewhere in the novel to describe when characters fall in love. The metaphor of the supernova also hints at the destruction that will attend this relationship—the second betrayal of Cassidy’s list.

“All she wants it to unscrew a jar and be rid of me like she was of my Beetle Bob all those years ago.”

Cassidy’s attachment to her mother speaks to the powerful bond between parents and children. The consequence of this attachment is the deep and enduring loss Cassidy feels at abandonment. Cassidy’s fear of her mother leaving her, expressed in this passage, foreshadows first Dave’s leaving, then Marigold’s abandonment.

“Sunlight flooded out of the sky the way it does here and nowhere else.”

Hints appear throughout the novel that Paradise Springs is a unique town and has a magical quality about it. Bernadette’s description of the sunlight when she and her parents first visited is one such hint. While these suggestions add to the sense of magical realism that the novel evokes, these allusions also indicate moments of heightened emotion, suggesting the way that vivid events leave a lasting impression on the mind.

“So it was, because of Alonso, everyone in this glum faraway town got new eyes, slid into love, slipped into the marvelous.”

The novel includes elements of magical realism in the setting and in the attractive power of characters who are said to exert influence on the world around them. Several elements of magical realism are used to describe the influence of Alonso Fall, whose story, as told by Cassidy, resembles fable and fairy tale.

“For Alonso, having a best friend was like having a secret suitcase full of sky, of rivers, of endless summer afternoons.”

Nelson’s prose is full of vivid imagery, frequently using natural elements to create an impact. These images of natural beauty are likewise used to describe the care characters feel for one another, as evidenced in this passage when Alonso first meets Sebastian and feels that possibilities for his identify have opened up.

“A door in Miles’s chest—one he hadn’t realized was there—swung open.”

The novel describes a path of transformation for many characters, sometimes positive and sometimes harmful. Miles, who began the book in a state of depression he calls The Gloom Room, first feels enlivened by meeting Cassidy, and then falls for Felix. The metaphor of the opening door signifies how Miles comes to feel free to express his inner self, including identifying as gay.

“I’m surprised colors aren’t coming out of the violin, bright swirling paint filling the air, that’s how beautiful the sound you’re making is now, like you’re walking through the house that is me flipping up shades, letting light in.”

A frequent transformation touched on is the novel is that of meeting a person who makes the character feel enlivened and invigorated. Cassidy has that effect on others, but she also feels the same effect when she first meets Wynton, as captured by this metaphor of her as a house he lets the light into. Images of light frequently accompany moments of love and joy.

“[Miles] had a weird feeling, like he was becoming more himself with every moment that passed.”

One way the transformations of various characters is described is with imagery of light or awakening of the senses; the theme of destiny also surfaces. On his road trip with Felix, when Miles is able to talk about what he’s going through, his transformation involves coming to terms with his feelings, which makes him feel more like himself and less like a monster or performer.

“It was as if the girl who’d always been wild and bold had been a mere caterpillar and the moment she stepped aboard this ship, she began transforming into a startlingly beautiful creature that might at any moment sprout wings.”

Maria is another character who undergoes transformation in the novel. The destiny she longs for is the freedom to do as she pleases, which is represented by the imagery of having wings.

“If only we could have joys without sorrows, blessings without curses.”

This line concludes a portion of Alonso and Sebastian and Maria’s story which Cassidy tells Felix and Felix tells Miles, the narrative becoming a throughline and backbone of the novel as it illustrates the history of the Fall family and the supposed curse. While this line seems a wistful contemplation of the impossible, the novel reaches a more hopeful conclusion as later events suggest that joy can accompany pain, and blessings can come out of curses.

“I think it’s possible to live our lives without believing in destiny, without feeling it at work in the choices we make, or the choices that are made for us. But it feels impossible to tell the story of our lives without it. Stories give our lives structure, and that structure is destiny.”

In addition to the direct narrative, much of the action of the novel is told through performed stories, like the history of her life that Cassidy tells Wynton, the story of the Fall family as narrated by Cassidy to Felix, and even the snippets of narrative in Bernadette’s letters. While destiny is a motif in the novel, Cassidy introduces a metafictional moment when she examines the structure of her own history, using destiny to explain the coincidence that Theo Fall is her father, and the reason she sought out the rest of the Fall family.

“Standing on the porch in the yellowy sunlight holding her father’s hand, Dizzy no longer felt like the walking-talking paint splatter of a person she usually did, instead like a calm fearless one.”

While the novel looks deeply at the impacts of parental abandonment, it also addresses the joy of restoration. A parallel emerges in the paired chapters where Cassidy discovers that she has a father while Dizzy takes joy in finding her father again. These reunions present opportunities for healing and moments of transformation.

“More world, I remember thinking. More and more and then some more world. (Be on the lookout for these moments, my children.)”

For Bernadette, the entrance of the Fall boys transforms her life, making her feel that more is possible—that she, still grieving her brother’s death, could be possible again. This opening mimics the arc of several other characters. The direct address to her children reminds the reader of the device of the letters, which is the way Bernadette gets to tell her story, in a novel bound up with several strands of narrative.

“We’ve spent the last twelve years living inside your…your goneness. All of us. It’s like we breathe it, speak it, sleep alongside it.”

The imagery Miles uses to articulate his feelings to his father represent his abandonment as a type of persistent presence, an ironic opposition. The impacts of grief and parental absence are deeply intertwined themes of the book.

“[Clive] was my devil, Theo, my angel. With Clive I was the plain old screwed-up person I was. With Theo I became the person I wanted to be.”

Bernadette’s conflict provides another slant on the motif of transformations sparked by a person, because she is faced with two possibilities: the person she is with Theo, and the person she is with Clive. She feels a pull to both sides of the Fall family, as they have been described in Cassidy’s stories, and her decision perpetuates the enduring grief she has felt over her brother’s death.

“Then you jump and Miles jumps too because he does everything you do, and how you love that […] Only you can make Miles stop crying. Only you can make Miles fall asleep. Only you can make him laugh like a crazy kid. Only you, his big brother.”

The animosity between Wynton and Miles, introduced early, which becomes a pattern for the Cain and Abel curse between the Fall brothers, is later explained by Wynton’s fear that he and Miles did not share a father. The intensity of his love becomes a source of deep pain, the way curses and blessings are elsewhere mixed together, just like joy and sorrow.

“I think in this moment how maybe I’m always all the girls I’ve ever been, how the now-me is just all the old-mes thrown together. And maybe you can’t hang on to people […] but my, how we hang on to our love for them, or it hangs on to us.”

Cassidy’s recognition at seeing Dave Caputo again brings her to this realization about how her history has formed her, and how all her identities weave together. Echoing Dizzy’s previous thought that love doesn’t always go both ways, Cassidy thinks of the endurance of loves as a force that shapes personality.