Character analysis in literature and storytelling

¶ … character Robyn Panek in the novel. This novel begins with Robyn confronting her past and emotionally remembering the very moment she became an adult, a specific incident in the novel that became a turning point for her and colored her entire adult life.

In the opening of the book, Robyn returns to her aunt and uncle's farm in Massachusetts, somewhere she spent every summer at as a child. She thinks to herself, "Good and bad, it happened right here on the ground on which I once again stand. All this because Lucy Dragon came to stay in the nice clean room we had for rent" (Shea 3). This is the life-altering event of her young life, because as much as she loved the farm and her summers there, for some reason she never returned after the summer she turned eighteen. She never went back until her uncle is dying, and she never planned to take over the farm, even though her aunt and uncle wanted her to when she was young. She thinks to herself about the farm, "It was like my blood ran down different veins when I got back to Massachusetts" (Shea 26). That is the mystery that surrounds this story and Robyn's life -- why she never went back and abandoned the farm. It is also a pivotal action that takes her down the road to adulthood, which is why it is so important to the story.

Robyn is an interesting character that draws the reader into this novel, because they want to know the mystery and uncover what happened that could be so horrible that it would lead her away from the farm. It clearly has something to do with the "crazy" Lucy Dragon, who reappears the same summer Robyn returns to the farm, and the fact that she attempted suicide and ended up the back of a police car the summer Robyn turned eighteen, but there is more to it than that. Robyn shut herself away from the farm she loved because of what happened there, but the book is a slow introduction to her final summer before college, when she is struggling with all the things and eighteen-year-old struggles with and survives. One minute they are on top of the world and the next minute they are deep in despair. She thinks, "A big gilt-edged mirror held up higher and straighter with each week that passed" (Shea 135). Lucy is going through the same things, and trying to think about what the future holds, so they become closer as the summer goes on.

Robyn is a planner, which is illustrated by the way she has her wedding planned four years before she thinks it will happen, and how she looks forward to knowing where she will be every step of her summer and future year in college. When something disrupts her plans, like finding Frankie with Lucy and the missing baby, it is easy to see how this could change her entire life. Throughout the book, she seems unemotional, even over the impending death of her uncle, and it is easy to see why after what she discovered. Every dream she has for the future is shattered when she discovers Frankie and Lucy, and her whole future disappears. She says, "You could play around with words for ten years and still not come up with the proper combination for how I felt at that moment. Awful. Dead. Betrayed" (Shea 193). Robyn, her dreams shattered, has never learned forgiveness, because she could never forgive Lucy and Frankie for what they did. It takes her uncle's passing to allow her to come to terms with that summer when she turned eighteen, that, and Lucy showing up again after twenty-two years and no contact at all.

Robyn even acknowledges to herself that she cannot forgive and that has eaten away at her adult life. She says, "I realized I hadn't thought about that skill of his in years, and I pushed it away fast" (Shea 206). Even when they tried to get back together, Lucy was between them and Robyn could not forgive him, but she admits she spent her life trying to find him. She says, "You can waste a good portion of your life looking for what you've lost. Always looking" (Shea 230). As the book progresses, it becomes quite clear that even though Robyn has a "normal" life, she never recovered after that last summer on the farm, and that she has never been happy in her life. She has a daughter, but not a husband, and she has so many broken dreams that she is broken herself. When she sees Frankie, she realizes that. She says, "I used to imagine. Often. Very, very often. For a lot longer than was healthy. Years and years past the one disappointment that colored everything for me" (Shea 258). Robyn is a sad character not because her life has turned out badly, but because she let one horrible and life-defining moment torment her for the rest of her life. Lucy is looking for forgiveness too, forgiveness from the baby she kidnapped, so the entire novel is really a testimony to what can happen to a person when they cannot forgive and allow the feeling to fester inside them for years. Luckily, her story does end happily. She and Frankie reunite, but the best thing is, she has learned how to forgive and how to allow herself to be happy, and that was the real journey that started twenty-two years before on her family's farm.