Both four-feet-ten-inches and ninety-two pounds, the twelve-year-old protagonists and first cousins, Gypsy Leemaster, the narrator, and Woodrow Prater become best friends over the course of the novel after an unlikely start. Gypsy, the more sophisticated, beautiful, long-haired blonde, befriends Woodrow, the hillbilly with the crossed blue eyes and thick glasses, after he is sent to live next door with his grandparents following the disappearance of his mother.
Their friendship provides the main theme of the novel in addition to the themes of beauty, death, retaliation, and like all youngadult novels, maturation.
The friendship of the cousins grows as they learn to accept each other and, moreover, to respect each other. They learn compassion and kindness through their awareness of each other's problems. Although Woodrow possesses more of these qualities than Gypsy does at first, she.....
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