Donna D asked:

Can anyone explain the ending to me?

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11 years ago
11 answers

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Jen

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Debbie In my opinion, Odelia and Rose are the 2 personalities of a mentally ill Generva.

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Michele

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Jessica

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Kenneth Funk Odalie and Genevra are the same person. Odalie befriends Rose so that she has a ready made patsy to pin blame on if something goes wrong. Odalie is well to do and was able to erase Rose's past (the time in the orphanage), probably through bribery or some such. After doing that is leaves Rose on the hook for Teddy's murder while Odalie sheds her skin and becomes someone new, just as she did when she stopped being Genevra.

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Zaida (Spoilers) I think there are several theories that could apply to the end. The one I think is this:

Genevra killed her fiancé and kept those bracelets. She then started calling herself Rose. She became a bootlegger and got her "in" card by becoming a typist at the precinct. She was renting the apartment. She also dropped a brooch that a plain, mousy girl, who was an orphan named Odalie picked up. Then Rose killed Teddy and got locked up in the institution. It was somewhere around there (Teddy's arrival) that she began to lose touch with reality and maybe started seeing herself not as the Vixen but as the plain orphan. Killing him protected her from the truth of who she really was, (also what she did.)

Now she is telling the story after being locked away for weeks, but she sees herself as the plain, orphaned girl. She sees herself that way even when she looks in the mirror because she is crazy. So that leaves Odalie to take her REAL place as the bootlegging vixen, when she is telling the story after all this time. She has basically stolen Odalie's REAL past, and has made it her own.

She is also telling the story so unreliably because she is not that "mousy" plain girl that she is now claiming to be, but imagining herself in Odalie's real place. So she has to make things up, lie about what she heard, and change up what really happened so that it fits HER version of reality. She even admits to imagining several scenarios on several occasions. Really the story that she is telling is just her imagining herself in the place of the REAL Odalie (plain/orphan) because in the end she was always that romantic, bootlegger and whoever Odalie really was- she was not the girl Rose is trying to make her out to be because that was the real Rose all along.

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Vt I am so happy that someone else was confused by the ending of this book! I read it originally last year, and I just reread it...but still....I was confused! Thank you for the explanations. Even though they were different, I felt better just knowing I'm not alone! :)

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