Metaphor Mentioned
Before the first page of the book is done and just a few paragraphs into things, the narrator actually discussing metaphors. The epigraph which precedes the first chapter is a quote from the Betty Smith novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is actually pretty rare for a character to explicitly reference the work mentioned in an epigraph so that one should take the fact the narrator here not only does so, but gets right to it as a sign that getting to know Smith’s work itself is probably not a bad idea:
“It’s the same tree the girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn saw from her fire escape. The thing about that tree was it could grow anywhere. And keep growing. And that was the metaphor : that even when things got really hard for everyone in that story—even when the dad died and the mom had to scrub more and more floors to make money, even when the kids didn’t have anything to eat for days and the apartment was freezing—the tree kept growing.”
Funny
The narrator, pre-teen Haley Shondell McGrath, is pretty funny. A way with words is demonstrated throughout, but a comic sensibility when it comes to using similes as metaphorical description is really the sharpest knife in the narrative’s drawer:
“Holly nodded. A look came over her—as though the words were finding a room in her brain.”
Not-So-Funny
Haley’s narration can also use metaphorical imagery for the purpose of being not-so-funny. The tonal shifts from breezy comical observation to intense self-reflection is not the easiest thing to pull in a book narrated by a kid and directed toward a readership of kids. That’s a tough obstacle course to navigate without stumbling over the biggest hurdle: mawkish sentimentality. This is an example of how to leap like a gazelle over that obstruction:
“Forgive and forget, my uncle said. Staring at those letters, I thought I could forgive my father. But I could never forget. I’d lock every moment of memory inside a room in my brain and hope they’d multiply like cells in our bodies, until I was a grown-up all filled with memories.”
When Slide Meets Scooter
When she was six years old the narrator is involved in a freak accident at the local park. The park features a covered slide that sends kids flying through a twisted tunnel and unceremoniously dumps them out blindly. A million to one shot happens one day when Haley is flying out of the tunnel just as a bigger kid “thick as a wall” is speeding toward the slide on his scooter. The collision sends her to the hospital with broken arm, sixteen stitches behind her ear, and emotional trauma, but she earns a metaphorical badge of honor from her Uncle:
“You’re a soldier in the army of sliding board catastrophes.”
Hierarchical Humor
The students in room 501—the ARTT room—are encouraged by their teacher to discuss anything they want. With no faculty oversight to inhibit them, their teacher is entrusting them to have the willpower themselves to avoid the obvious pitfalls here and stay on the track she has set them upon. Nevertheless, it is up to group as a whole to ensure that one rogue student doesn’t throw the whole train off-schedule or even completely off-track:
“You’re going to get Ms. Laverne in trouble.
Teachers can’t get in trouble, Holly said. They’re like the God of school.
Nah, the principal is the God. The teachers are the angels, Ashton said.
I had a teacher who was more like the devil once, Tiago said.”
