Identity and names

[Hillary]

You'd have to be under a rock not to notice the theme of identity in this book. How the fairies don't really have names--they aren't even really fairies--that's just what she calls them. She and her sister have the same name--she's actually taken her sister's name (I swear I'm the only one who noticed this, but when she swears not to do magic she signs her name Morganna, but she tells everyone that her name is Morwenna.)The whole thing is about trying to fit in.

So what's the point of it all?

[Mickie]

I think you hit the point on the head (so to speak). At the end she makes a choice to "come out" and live among the others...which means to be an individual. I think...

[Casceil]

It's a coming of age story. The main character achieves her own identity and finally steps away from identifying with her dead sister. This book has been nominated for a Hugo. I suspect a lot of its appeal to science fiction fans is the way the author chronicles the character's discoveries of specific well-known authors and books in the genre. I went to my first science fiction convention in 1978, the year before the book is set,and I could relate to a lot of her voyage of discovery. I could remember thinking some of the things this character expressed. E.g., travelling always made me think of T.S. Eliott's Four Quartets. She also expresses very clearly a feeling that many science fiction fans have when they discover other fans who think like they do, when it has always seemed that the rest of the world thought/acted/dressed differently.

[???!!!]

I actually flipped back pages just to make sure I got her name right. So, I did catch it. I agree with other's opinion that the whole book is about identity, about which world does she lived in. It was not until the end that she figure it out. I was especially moved by the ending.

[Budd]

You can't trust the narrator in this story. The sister may not even be real. The mother was obviously abusive and the narrator may have created the sister as the one that gets the punishment or as the narrator's innocense. The part in the woods was the narrator contemplating suicide. The author goes so far as to mention other stories with unreliable narrators.

[Sparrowlicious]

... actually, she states later in the story anyway that she took her sister's name. It's Morgana who tells the story. Since it's written like a diary it's hard to say what's actually 'real' in this story and what's not. You might want to think of it as a story that was written by a character who attempts to turn her life into a novel story.

[LindaJ^]

I don't think the book is about fitting in nor that it is a coming of age story. I think it is about battling one's own demons and prevailing. I do remember Mori saying she was using her sister's name. I hadn't considered that perhaps the sister did not ever exist - interesting thought. Of course, the fairies are real.