What A Character

There are thousands upon thousands of fictional characters in literature, and choosing only one single character proves to be difficult. In the end, I chose a girl named Willow.

Willow is the main character of a teen fiction novel written by Julia Hoban that shares her namesake. As a sixteen year old girl, Willow is reminded everyday that she is the cause of the car accident that took her parent's lives. The guilt consumes her until the point where she begins inflicting harm upon herself.

To be honest, when I read this book over three years ago, I didn't enjoy it very much. In fact, I detested it. I thought it overly dramatic and ridiculous that a person could push themselves to the brink of death because of something that was beyond their control. That the author knew nothing of the mindset of humans who happened to be suicidal and simply wrote the book on a whim.

I now see that I was wrong.

Hoban uses third person point of view to depict Willow's inner turmoil, hopelessness, and lonesomeness as how it appears to another person in the novel. The reader is not meant to understand the situation completely because we are not inside her mind, we do not have all the details. Just as in real life where you can judge a person by how they appear to be on the outside, but not know what's going on the inside.