While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action.

Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house-and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw-Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and-most serious-civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves-during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement. Carbone projects her fictional narrative on historical characters (parsed in an author’s note), presenting the white settlers as mostly amicable and welcoming of cultural mixing, and the fundamental violation that is colonialism is not really questioned.Īnother settler’s-eye view of Colonial history. In one freighted scene, an inscrutable Powhatan man touches Ginny’s forehead, a gesture she feels is connected with her knowing in another she has a vision of crowded ships, including one full of Africans, and is frightened by the “sheer mass of ,” drawing no distinction between white settlers and Africans in bondage. Depictions of Native Americans place these characters as the backdrop, viewed always through Ginny’s eyes, however sympathetic, as other. When Ginny’s secret is suspected, she is slated to be tried for witchcraft a later threat of Indian attack on the colony defuses the tension generated by Ginny’s plight.

Ginny is a descendant of a long line of women who have suffered persecution as witches. Initially, the only person who knows of Ginny’s secret is her family’s friend Samuel Collier, a young white man who acts as Native American cultural interpreter throughout the book (and who was the protagonist of Blood on the River, 2006). Young Ginny Laydon, the first child born in the white settler colony of Jamestown, Virginia, carries “the knowing,” or second sight.

A young white girl observes the beginnings of English colonization of the American continent, including encounters with Native Americans and enslavement of the newly arrived Africans.

Jump by Elisa Carbone