Character Robyn Panek in the Research Paper

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She says, "You could play around with words for ten years and still not come up with the proper combination for how I felt at that moment. Awful. Dead. Betrayed" (Shea 193). Robyn, her dreams shattered, has never learned forgiveness, because she could never forgive Lucy and Frankie for what they did. It takes her uncle's passing to allow her to come to terms with that summer when she turned eighteen, that, and Lucy showing up again after twenty-two years and no contact at all.

Robyn even acknowledges to herself that she cannot forgive and that has eaten away at her adult life. She says, "I realized I hadn't thought about that skill of his in years, and I pushed it away fast" (Shea 206). Even when they tried to get back together, Lucy was between them and Robyn could not forgive him, but she admits she spent her life trying to find him. She says, "You can waste a good portion of your life looking for what you've lost. Always looking" (Shea 230). As the book progresses, it becomes quite clear that even though Robyn has a "normal" life, she never recovered after that last summer on the farm, and that she has never been happy in her life. She has a daughter, but not a husband, and she has so many broken dreams that she is broken herself. When she sees Frankie, she realizes that. She says, "I used to imagine. Often. Very, very often. For a lot longer than was healthy. Years and years past the one disappointment that colored everything for me" (Shea 258). Robyn is a sad character not because her life has turned out badly, but because she let one horrible and life-defining moment torment her for the rest of her life. Lucy is looking for forgiveness too, forgiveness from the baby she kidnapped, so the entire novel is really a testimony to what can happen to a person when they cannot forgive and allow the feeling to fester inside them for years.

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Luckily, her story does end happily. She and Frankie reunite, but the best thing is, she has learned how to forgive and how to allow herself to be happy, and that was the real journey that started twenty-two years before on her family's farm.

In conclusion, Robyn is a complicated character who clearly has issues with forgiveness and forgetting the past. Really, it is hard to determine who is the real "crazy" one in the book. Lucy was "crazy" but is now a successful businesswoman who also struggles with forgiveness. Robyn is a successful educator, but she lives an unhappy and unfulfilled life because of the past. Who is the real "crazy" person? The one who allows her past to overcome her future and keep her from forgiving the people she needs to forgive to move on with her life. Robyn is not "crazy" by any means, but the comparison between the two women characters is clear. Robyn allows a pivotal time to completely take over her life, and it takes her uncle's illness to bring the group back together so she can finally get what she has been waiting for all these years......

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