Genre
Historical Fiction
Setting and Context
The early 1600s around the Jamestown colony.
Narrator and Point of View
The novel is told from a third person point of view.
Tone and Mood
The tone of the novel is candid, desperate, and excited. The novel's mood is tense, anxious, and adventurous.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The girl is the novel's protagonist and the challenges she faces in her colony, and in the wild, are the novel's antagonist.
Major Conflict
The major conflict of the novel involves the girl's struggles to survive in the dangerous wilderness outside of her colony.
Climax
When the girl finally finds a place where she can be accepted for who she is.
Foreshadowing
The girl eventually leaving her colony because of poor conditions is foreshadowed by her interactions with other colonists.
Understatement
The sheer depravity of some of the colonists is understated throughout the novel.
Allusions
There are numerous allusions to history (particularly the history of the Jamestown colony), to religion, and to mythology.
Imagery
Groff frequent uses intense olfactory imagery to describe the poor conditions many of the colonists were living in because of disease and malnutrition and to describe how the colony smelled because of it.
Paradox
The main character is a young girl with little life experience, but is frequently able to survive dangerous situations involving people and animals much stronger than she is.
Parallelism
n/a
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The colony is used to refer to the Jamestown colony, one of the first colonies in the New World.
Personification
The disease that affects the entire colony is frequently personified throughout the novel.
