How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Mum was okay, sort of: a pale, slender woman with wispy blonde hair pulled back in an untidy knot. The worst you could say of her was that she worried about Lonnie too much and worked too hard at her job—long, long hours at the day-care center, then bringing home paperwork and sometimes actual people, old people whose care-giver children were quite desperate for a break. (1.6)
If you have mixed feelings about Marigold's attitude toward her job versus her family, we don't blame you; it kind of seems a little unfair that she overworks herself at the expense of Lily overworking herself at home. On the other hand, as a single-parent family, her income does carry a lot of weight and she probably needs all the hours she can get. Nonetheless, balancing a career with her family is clearly a challenge Marigold faces.
Quote #2
[Lily] wished she was like the other girls in Year Ten, like Lizzie Banks or Lara Reid or even awful Tracy Gilman. She wished she could, just once, enjoy filling in a quiz from Bestie without thinking it was bulls***, or talk about clothes without suddenly remembering the funny noise the washing machine had started making and how much it might cost to get it fixed. (2.2)
Teenage girls are notorious drama queens—clothes, personalities, friends, and boys are the center of the universe, and heaven help anyone who's within a half-mile radius when the bottom falls out of any of those things. For Lily, though, being a normal teenage female doesn't come so easy—her roles at home force her to be more mature than she feels she should be. Part of us thinks this isn't such a bad thing, but we can certainly understand her frustration.
Quote #3
Lily pictured her grandmother in the kitchen, busy at her spotlessly scrubbed table, so calm and efficient—perhaps all that housework, years and years and years of it, was responsible for poor old Nan's delusion that she had an imaginary companion. Perhaps one day, not too far away down the track, Lily herself would begin to see another person standing at the kitchen bench beside her, shadowy at first, then becoming clearer. (2.5)
Obviously, doing a lot of housework and cleaning doesn't make you certifiable, at least not in the clinical sense. Still, this gives us an idea of how Lily relates to the women in her family. She doesn't seem to want to be her mother, but she also seems terrified of becoming Nan. The fact that she doesn't know the truth about Sef being a really person doesn't help either.