Without the experience and wisdom of understanding the complications of life and fallibility of human beings, Ben and Ella for instance are mired in a place in which they have only one way of understanding their world -- returning to the comfort of antagonism.
The loss of a mother comes to us again in "What We Save." In this case, Helena is juxtaposed between understanding what is really happening to her sick mother, while at the same time dealing with her burgeoning adolescence and the rather unsavory advances of the young sons of her mother's own, ironically, childhood boyfriend. Again, Helena initially "sees" the world through a rather childlike haze of hierarchical events: mothers take care of children, not the reverse; people are nice to one another, not implolite and rutting around like an animal. Helena simply cannot understand what makes the boys act this way -- and her own response is to move into a psychological world that takes her into the past, "the way...
Her task, then, is learning to "breathe" in an alien environment in which life makes no sense, in which family is topsy-turvy, and one in which she is unable to fully comprehend social stigma and responsibility, and simply pines for childhood again.
Within each of these story lines, the characters are all too human -- they are flawed, magical, and quite believable. Who among us has not felt "out of balance," and frightened at the uncertainty of loss. This is not a book to make one feel cozy and comfortable, it is not a book to read while sipping chicken soup and nursing a cold. Instead, it is a thought provoking and all too accurate description of what it means to evolve from childhood into adulthood, and how that process just isn't all that much fun. It is a book about coping skills -- but still, ultimately about the wonderous skills we humans have to survive even the most incongruous of experiences.
