Ann S. Character Analysis

Jeanette’s birth mother, Ann was just sixteen and working in a factory when she got pregnant. After six months of raising Jeanette in a home for mothers and babies, Ann chose to give Jeanette up for adoption. One of ten children, Ann and her large family embrace Jeanette once she finds them again—Ann tells Jeanette that she was “always wanted,” confirming what Ria told Jeanette months earlier. Ann is warm, welcoming, and funny, and both interested in and sorry for Jeanette’s difficult childhood and adolescence. In the book’s coda, Jeanette describes her burgeoning relationship with Ann—the two of them are similar in some ways but very different in others, and though Jeanette thinks that Ann “would like [Jeanette] to let [her] be [her] mother,” Jeanette is “wary” of believing she has lucked into an “instant family.” Jeanette, at the book’s end, does not know exactly how she feels about Ann, and has “no idea what happens next.”