Essay Questions

Why are Camille and Adora estranged?

Mother and daughter have never got along; Adora has never made a secret about her preference for Camille's sister, Marian, and has been deliberately distant towards Camille for her entire life. Camille has felt this antipathy and has reacted accordingly by turning on herself. After Marian's death, their relationship soured even more although Camille is not aware at the time that she is suspicious of her mother; these feelings are pushed down and buried so that she doesn't have to think about them. When she learns that Marian died because of Adora, she realizes that she always suspected her mother in the death but never wanted to name what she was feeling. Being estranged from her mother meant that she did not have to address this issue and could essentially hide away from it.

Amma is a sociopath. In what way does this fact manifest itself?

Aside from the obvious ability to murder her peers and younger children without feeling any guilt at all, one of the main manifestations of Amma's sociopathy is in her ability to manipulate those around her and to appear to be what she knows they want her to be. For example, she is a party girl and a drinker, but she knows that her mother would not approve of this at all. To combat this, she appears to her parents to be a girl who is far younger and more innocent than her years, and gives the impression that she does not want to grow up quickly but wants to stay in the safe haven that is her home.

Even after Adora's arrest she seems to feel no guilt for having implicated her mother in two murders she did not commit. She positions herself as the victim and gains the trust of her sister and her peers, only to use that to enable herself to kill again.