“She glanced at her grandmother—you can’t depend on people who just let things happen.”

Sophia needs explicit permission to feel comfortable going swimming, reflecting her very young age. She is trying to understand the world around her, and she relies on her grandmother for guidance. This reliance is the result of Sophia’s young age, the close connection she has with her grandmother, and the loss of her mother. The line also suggests that Sophia is scared, and it hints that Sophia feels that her mother’s death could have been prevented.

“Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.”

This line establishes three important factors in the context of the book—that the family spends summers on an island, that Sophia’s mother has died, and that this is Sophia’s first summer on the island without her mother. The death of Sophia’s mother helps explain the close relationship between Sophia and Grandmother as well as Father’s emotional distance from them, and introduces the theme of Healing From Loss.

“It had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable.”

The description of the magic forest as “delicate” is intended to symbolize the conditions within the family, which has recently endured the loss of Sophia’s mother (See: Symbols & Motifs). Like the forest, Sophia’s emotional state is fragile.