Out of the Woods

“Win grins like the devil herself. ‘He was reading a book…like a real book. A hardcover with a broken-in spine. Something old.’ I gasp and slam my locker shut. ‘Where is he?’”

In this scene, Hannah Bonam-Young establishes Win and Sarah’s close bond and Sarah’s carefree, youthful priorities. Win knows that Sarah is not merely interested in dating—her love of books is what defines her. This is the novel’s only scene of Sarah before Caleb is central to her life, underscoring how fundamental their relationship is to her character, and how fundamental reading is to their first connection.

“Not before bed every night, as her parents so rigidly instructed her, or at a Sunday mass, or to apologize for a laundry list of transgressions that one didn’t need to feel all that sorry for. Instead, my mother, the no-nonsense woman that she was, taught me to treat my one-way calls to the big man in the sky as more of a crisis hotline and less as a suggestion box.”

The anecdote here establishes that Sarah’s family history involves religious trauma. Her grandparents—who are not in her life—were “rigid” and obsessed with notions of sin that Marcie came to find unimportant. Marcie, in contrast, sees God as a kind of emergency beacon. Sarah is skeptical about the value of this practice, as she treats contact with a deity as entirely “one-way.” The anecdote introduces Marcie in the past tense, showing early on how the power of Sarah’s grief and her memories will act as motivational forces for her.

“It’s the cursed roles we’ve been stuck in since the eleventh grade. The gallant knight riding in on his white horse is here to save me once again. And shit, if being the damsel in distress isn’t getting old.”

Sarah references fairy tale tropes to convey her exhaustion with their relationship dynamic and with this quote, introduces the theme of The Tension Between Personal Growth and Marital Stability. The adjective “cursed” conveys the sense of desperation and hopelessness Sarah feels— her marriage is no longer a source of strength but instead a trap, like a spell she cannot escape.