Lucy

Lucy is the novel's main character, as every chapter with the exception of Chapter 21 is narrated in third-person limited from her perspective. She is 12 years old when the novel begins and roughly 17 when it ends. Lucy grows up in the hills of the Western territory, presumably in the United States at the end of the gold rush. Her family lives in poverty in a small town where her father (and sometimes Lucy herself) works in a coal mine while prospecting for gold on the side. Lucy becomes fixated on attending the local school and getting an education from the instructor, Teacher Leigh, but she does so at the expense of her family. When Ba discovers a cache of gold in the hills, Lucy takes a piece of it to Teacher Leigh's house, but along the way she falls and the gold is taken from her, resulting in the...