Secrets

One of my favorite moments in the entire book was during the scene in English class, where the class discussed secrets. There are so many secrets in Black Swan Green - just listing them all could take a whole blog post. For one, there's the broken watch from the very first chapter, haunting Jason as he seeks to repair it and worries sick about what his Dad would think. Then there's the secret of Jason's role in the whole affair of Ross Wilcox and his leg, a situation so grey that it's really hard to tell how much blame and if any falls on Jason's shoulders. There's Jason's secret identity as a poet, as Eliot Bolivar. There's the gigantic secrets kept from all the adults, as children often do, of the reality of school and other children. Neither of Jason's parents know of anything that happens to him at school - not his crushes, not the Spooks, certainly not the bullying. Neither do the adults in the school know what's going on - it all happens beneath their radar. Is it really a secret if the whole student body knows and just the adults don't?

The issue of definition comes up during the class as well - about what constitutes as a secret. How many people need to know before the secret is no longer a secret? Or does it only need to be kept from specific people to still constitute as a secret? For example, Jason tells the woman at the shop about the broken watch, but his parents still don't know he broke it, and therefore it is still a secret.

Morality is another issue that comes out. What secrets should be told? Should Jason tell people about Ross Wilcox? Will anything come out of it? It certainly won't get Ross Wilcox his leg back. Secrets have consequences. There's a reason that for so long, Jason's father didn't tell his wife about mortgaging the house, or else she would've wanted to know why, and their marriage would've spiraled much faster. As far as Jason's father knew, she might've never found out. Jason thinks he knows what the consequences of him telling certain secrets will be. Snitches get stitches. Despite this, he still grinds the calculator and then that tells the administration of the awful bullying happening at the school. While grinding the calculator may have not been the most ethical step, it was a necessary one to get the teachers aware of what was happening in the school.

However, he often ends up wrong about the consequences. Jason ended up getting a sort of sense of status at the school after the incident. Jason's dad dismissed the watch breaking as not a big deal. His sister knew he was Eliot Bolivar and enjoyed his poetry.

The novel ends bittersweet, but with most of the secrets off the table and in the air, Jason's ready for a new start.

Is Sylvie a Good Parental Figure?

Sylvie's often described within Housekeeping as seeing the world in a very dream-like state. Everything she does seems to be imitating how "real people" do it rather than coming from a place of instinct - when she cleans, it's only partly; she eats dinner in the dark; she decorates the house with weird boxes and cans to make it seem like a real living space. We often commented that it seemed like the narrator also described everything around her with a strange detachment and with an artistic, dreamlike quality - we wondered how Ruth got to the point she did in her narration. At some point in discussion, we settled in that she was like Sylvie, in that way, and that she got her strange narration style from Sylvie. However, one could argue that it doesn't make her a very dependable narrator.

Ruth doesn't seem to mind Sylvie's strange transient habits, and with Ruth's own dream-like narration, it's hard at time to pick out the realities of how Ruth and Lucille are living under Sylvie's care. However, Lucille's actions often serve as a rude awakening. I always think about the scene where they're eating dinner in the dark and then suddenly Lucille turns on the lights, illuminating the sort of conditions they live under. I as a reader also fell under the charm of Sylvie's transient lifestyle and the almost magic of her ways, and was beginning to view Lucille as a traitor in a way similar to how Ruth and Sylvie did. However, as Lucille turned on the lights, revealing the condition of the kitchen, I realized how unhygienic and truly uncomfortable the conditions they live under are. I continued to notice it throughout the rest of the book and could no longer disagree with Lucille. I wouldn't want to live with Sylvie as my parental figure. Sylvie consistently puts the girls in possibly unsafe situations.

However, I was still captivated by Sylvie's charm through Ruth's narration, and it did not miss me how important Sylvie had become to Ruth. I ended up in a strange juxtaposition by the end of the book - wanting both Ruth to leave the house and find a better place to live, but also rooting for Sylvie to be able to keep Ruth. Sylvie's love for Ruth is apparent, and while she may live an unusual lifestyle, does that inherently make her a bad parental figure, especially considering Ruth's embrace of Sylvie's lifestyle? Then a second question emerged for me, about whether Ruth, as a child, should have the ability to choose for herself who she lives with and how she lives? I'm not quite sure if I'll ever reach satisfying answers for these questions.

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(I apologize for this blog post being so late).