The novel portrays an expansive view of family that exceeds blood relations. Family is instead defined by the love, affection, loyalty, and understanding people show one another. One’s family is never set in stone: it can change depending on what people need in different circumstances.

Though the Pearce children were raised by their grandmother, she is not the type of family they spend the novel searching for. At her funeral in Chapter 1, the children are mystified by the amount of people at the wake who want to approach them with condolences and platitudes about their grandmother that do not accord with their perception of her. Edmund tells his siblings, “She was a miserable old cow, and you know it. Why must we all of a sudden pretend to have adored her?” (6). They are baffled by the funeral decorum of not speaking ill of the dead when the person who has died has few positive attributes. Throughout the novel they privately call her “the grandmother.” The impersonal article “the” denotes their emotional distance from her, as opposed to the more standard “our.”

When asking Mrs. Müller to be their new guardian, William reveals the reason for this distance. He tells Mrs.