Content Warning: This novel and guide discuss rape, child abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional), domestic violence, murder, kidnapping, torture, and death by suicide.

“Lord only knows what got loaded into their bags, but it does not matter because they do terrible things in packs, boys-who-are-men, things they’d never have the hate to do alone.”

As Heather describes coming-of-age in the 1970s like being dropped into a war zone, this quote foreshadows the violence that befalls the novel’s women from more than one man. Alongside the extended war metaphor, Laurey uses “packs” to compare groups of men to animals, foreshadowing the brutal violence that occurs in the book.

“I’d later wonder if that’s what cursed us, our boldness, our joy, but in that moment, it felt too good to stop.”

Heather uses foreshadowing again to reference the impending violence she and her friends will face at the hands of men. In this instance, she questions whether their determination to be brave and happy invited such violence into their lives. This speculation is loaded with irony given that the girls simply pursue joy—Laurey emphasizes the word with italics—which cannot reasonably provoke someone to violence.

“Sometimes I even imagined myself the wife of this house […] He was managing the world out there, and at the end of the day, his reward was that he got to return to his castle, where I spoiled him.”

Heather fantasizes about living within the gender expectations for women at the time which, as Heather reveals here, define women as caretakers of both their homes and husbands. Though she is still a child, she is assuming an adult female role, reflecting the ways Pantown’s girls’ childhoods are taken from them. Heather also assumes this gendered labor would be done primarily to please her husband, something she has learned from her mother, as many women in Pantown have.