The smell of bay rum would linger on her mother when she came back, this sent made Annie ill for a while. All Annie could see when she looked at her mother’s hands was her mom stroking the dead girl’s forehead. After that, Annie could not look at her mother’s hands the same. Annie’s father made the coffin while her mother prepared the little girl for burial. When Nalda dies, Annie’s mother helps Nalda’s mother prepare her for the funeral because she cannot bear to do it herself. She has no sympathy when she tells Annie that children can die too. I pick up on a coldness about her mother. Annie is so young and is obsessed with going to funerals and trying to see a dead person, but not just any dead person, someone that she knew so she could feel something or anything towards them.Īnnie and her mother have an interesting relationship from the start as well.

Annie had heard that dead people look similar to sleeping people, but she disagreed as she looked at this girl dead in her coffin. It was her face that Annie wanted to see. She crashed this girl’s funeral and looked at her as she lay in her coffin. Annie saw this as her chance to see a real life dead person that she had actually met when she was alive. Annie wanted to see not just anybody dead, she wanted to see someone she knew dead. However, the day finally came when a girl with a humpback from the neighboring school died. She began to go to funerals after school without telling her parents because, after her neighbor Miss Charlotte died, her parents would not let Annie attend the funeral. She was curious to see if people looked different in life than in death. Annie becomes obsessed with wanting to see a dead person up close, since she has never seen one before.

This is a strange start to a coming-of-age story because Annie is so young and is already obsessed with death. The story starts with death, explaining that Annie thought only people she did not know died. Death is a predominant theme in Annie John right from the beginning.

Annie john novel