In Which a Free Reading Book Shall be Attempted to be Analyzed

I recently read Impossible by Nancy Werlin. In short (hopefully) it is about a girl who lives with a foster family due to her crazy/mad mother. Lucy Scarborough goes to prom for the first time and is date raped (very out of character of her boyfriend who promptly commits suicide). Her best friend from childhood, Zach, comes to live with her and her family for the summer. They find out through her mother's (the mad one) diaries that it is a family curse for the girl to become pregnant at 18 (or 17), and upon the birth of her child (always a daughter), they go mad. The only way to stop this cycle is to perform the tasks in the "Scarborough Fair" song, including making a seamless shirt, finding an acre of land between the salt and the sea, plowing it with a goats horn and sowing it with a single grain of sand. The curse was implemented due to unrequited love by the "Elfin Knight" who also constantly thwarts any attempt to break it. Throughout the book Lucy and Zach (who fall in love and end up getting married half way through) and her family attempt to figure out how to break the curse before her daughter is born.

There appears to be many different types of heroes/sheroes within Impossible. There are the failed sheroes, the previous generations of Scarborough Girls. Lucy's foster parents are strong and end up helping to make a seamless shirt (home made felt on a dummy). There is also Lucy, the main sheroe, and Zach, the main hero.

Werlin emphasizes the importance of working together-the us rather than me. The previous girls did not have the support Lucy had and tended to be on their own attempting the "impossible" tasks, beginning the theory of madness and weak minds, which carried through the generations. However, Lucy is able to succeed with the help of her family, friends, and Zach.

Thus, there appears to be no one, individual hero, but rather a group that together creates and embodies the hero.

Does this imply then, that our society values the team rather than the individual accomplishment? We prefer to honor many rather than one? Or is it that we do not have confidence in the individual?

Ohh! Is it that when we do have confidence in the individual, we ask too much of them, and they fail, like the Scarborough girls did. That modern hero-requiring-acts-of-awesomeness actually require many to be completed?

Hmm...