What This Theme Explores
Control and Powerlessness probes how sexual violence shatters a person’s agency and how a survivor struggles—imperfectly, persistently—to reclaim it. The novel traces the ways power can be stolen not only from the body but from voice, home, friendships, and self-concept, and how attempts to regain control can veer into self-protection, manipulation, and risky reinvention. It asks whether power means detachment and dominance or, instead, the courage to tell the truth, accept care, and set boundaries. In the end, the book argues that authentic control emerges when a survivor owns her narrative rather than letting the assault define it.
How It Develops
The theme enters with a rupture. In the opening hours after the assault, Eden McCrorey is locked into shock and silence by Kevin Armstrong’s threats, an enforced powerlessness that spreads through her house, hallways, and head. Freshman year becomes a map of avoidance: she shrinks from bullies, flees to the library, and carves out a tiny sanctuary by organizing a quiet lunch-hour routine—a controllable island in a hostile sea.
Sophomore year, Eden tries to take power by curating the self others see. She swaps glasses for contacts, remakes her wardrobe, and sets strict rules when she begins seeing Josh Miller. The makeover promises mastery but proves brittle; her boundaries with Josh create distance that feels safe but also keeps connection—and the possibility of being known—at arm’s length.
By junior year, control turns inward and sharper. Eden initiates casual, anonymous encounters to flip an act that once erased her agency into something she directs. The rush is real but fleeting, exposing a painful paradox: by trying to dominate vulnerability, she deepens it, and the sense of command she’s chasing dissolves into isolation.
Senior year forces a reckoning. As her behavior strains friendships—most painfully with Mara—and sparks a confrontation with Steve Reinheiser, the revelation that Kevin has hurt others, including Amanda Armstrong, exposes the cost of her silence. Choosing to speak—first to Josh, then to her brother Caelin McCrorey, and finally to the police—reverses the power dynamic that began the novel. Control becomes less about commanding outcomes and more about reclaiming truth, safety, and self.
Key Examples
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The Initial Assault: Eden’s frozen, questioning inner monologue captures the terror of losing bodily autonomy and the cruel aftermath of self-blame. The scene establishes the novel’s baseline of powerlessness and the psychological chokehold that will shape every subsequent choice.
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Kevin’s Threats: His insistence that “no one will ever believe you” weaponizes disbelief to police Eden’s silence. The threats become a script in her head, demonstrating how power can persist as an echo long after the physical act ends.
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The Cafeteria Humiliation: When Eden is pelted with peas, the public mockery mirrors the private violation: she feels exposed, targeted, and voiceless. Her flight to the library and the creation of a quiet refuge show her attempting to control space when she cannot yet control her story.
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Dictating Terms to Josh: “I don’t want to be your girlfriend” is less a preference than a defense. By defining rules up front, Eden tries to hold power in a realm—intimacy—now coded as dangerous, revealing how trauma can recast closeness as loss of control.
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Reporting Kevin: Telling the police reorients control from secrecy to voice. It’s not a neat cure, but a decision to align power with truth and to resist the isolation Kevin imposed on her and on his other victims.
Character Connections
Eden’s trajectory is a study in survival tactics that start as protection and spiral into harm. Her reinventions—of appearance, relationships, and sexuality—are attempts to author a self untouched by the assault; each gives her a temporary lever of control but ultimately underscores the impossibility of outrunning a story she hasn’t yet told.
Kevin embodies predatory power that hides in familiarity. He exploits proximity, trust, and intimidation to command silence, revealing how abusers reshape not only events but the victim’s sense of what can be said—and believed.
Josh becomes a test case for the difference between control and consent. His patience shows Eden that yielding some control within a trustworthy relationship can expand, not diminish, her agency—an alternative to the dominance/defense model she’s been living by.
Caelin initially contributes to Eden’s powerlessness through obliviousness and misplaced authority, trying to manage her behavior rather than understand its roots. When he believes her and stands beside her, familial oversight transforms into support, illustrating how shared truth redistributes power back to the survivor.
Mara’s friendship strains under the opacity Eden maintains; the distance between them dramatizes the social cost of secrecy demanded by trauma. Their fracture and tentative repair show that relational power—trust, honesty, presence—can be rebuilt, but only when Eden risks voice.
Amanda Armstrong’s arc exposes the broader pattern of Kevin’s control and the communal harm of silence. Her decision to speak underscores the theme’s collective dimension: reclaiming power is not only personal justice but solidarity that interrupts an abuser’s reach.
Symbolic Elements
The Locked Bedroom Door turns into a nightly ritual of defense, a boundary Eden can enforce when others failed to. It is both a practical safeguard and a symbolic attempt to reassert sovereignty over her body and home.
The Sleeping Bag on the Floor marks the displacement of safety. By abandoning her bed—the site of violation—Eden makes visible how powerlessness lingers in muscle memory and how healing requires new spaces where the body can rest.
Physical Transformation operates as armor. Contacts, clothes, and makeup are a curated self she can command; the mask promises invulnerability even as it risks severing her from the “way she used to be.”
Sex Itself shifts from symbol of violation to a tool Eden tries to wield. By initiating and controlling encounters, she seeks to rewrite the script—but the hollowness that follows reveals the limits of power without intimacy, consent without connection.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel speaks directly to conversations surfacing in the #MeToo era about disbelief, coercive silence, and the complex ways survivors cope. It challenges snap judgments about “acting out” by reframing risky behavior as improvised strategies to regain agency in a world that dismissed it. By tracing the slow, nonlinear move from secrecy to testimony, the story models what cultural support might look like: believing survivors, respecting boundaries, and recognizing that voice—not vigilance—restores control.
Essential Quote
“No one will ever believe you. You know that. No one. Not ever.” … “You’re gonna keep your mouth shut.”
These threats crystallize the theme’s core: power maintained through enforced silence. Kevin’s words colonize Eden’s inner life, turning doubt into a guardrail that keeps her isolated; the novel’s emotional climax occurs when she refuses this script, proving that control begins where silence ends.