Protective Parenting
The overarching theme of the novel is that no matter how much one tries, there is no such thing as overprotective parenting. The best that one can hope for is protective parenting since there is no way to ensure a child won’t eventually face danger. The original Spanish title is a phrase repeated in the novel, rescue distance. This is the innate knowledge of an invisible line over which their child cannot cross without inhibiting the ability of the parent to rescue a child in danger. This line or distance is in a constant state of flux depending on movement, but also dependent upon the threat. The problem is that not all threats are apparent which makes the calculation meaningless when this is the case. The best a parent can do is to calculate rescue distance based on known dangers. But, of course, this ignorance of the existence of unknown dangers is the very problem that stimulates the narrative of the book.
Environmental Dangers
The unknown dangers in the story that make calculating rescue distance impossible are environmental. They are the result of the price of scientific advancement and progress. All around the fringes of the story are references to sickness and death ranging from animal carcasses to physical deformations. But nobody makes the connection between this pestilence and the poisoning of the natural world. A horse and child both get sick after drinking from the same stream, but what precisely caused the stream to become polluted is never fully explored. Likewise, the protagonist says that the wetness against the clothing of her and her daughter is simply dew, failing to recognize the connection that perhaps the cause of the moistness of the ground is far more dangerous than dew. The final lingering image in the book is of a father driving a car completely oblivious to all the myriad environmental dangers around him and unaware of their potential threat to his own life.
Threat Inequality
There are two mothers in the story. One lives in the big city and the other far out in the rural countryside. The child of the mother in the country has already gotten sick from drinking contaminated water and the folk remedy used to save his life has transformed him into something quite different than what he was. The mother and child never experienced any health problems in the city but almost immediately upon arriving in the country for a vacation, both get sick. The underlying thematic message is that it is the economic underprivileged who must pay the price for benefits of scientific advancement that benefit the privileged Not only are the poorer country folk more at risk for getting sick as a result of exposure to the more dangerous aspects of scientific progress but once they get sick they also suffer from lack of appropriate health care to the point of having to trust in superstition and folk healing passed down from one generation to the next.
