Penpal

Content Warning: This section depicts implied child abuse and child death.

The protagonist of Penpal is an unnamed narrator. The novel focuses largely on his childhood, detailing events that took place when he was five or six and during his teen years at ages 10, 12, and 14. However, the novel unfolds from the narrator’s perspective as an adult. He’s approximately 24 years old when he gets his mother to admit the truth about Josh’s death.

As a child, the narrator is fond of nature. The summer before he starts kindergarten, he falls while climbing a tree and breaks his arm, though this doesn’t deter him from excursions into the woods behind his house. The narrator describes himself as having inherited his mother’s curly brown hair. He’s drawn to warm feelings, which his pet kitten, Boxes, and his friendship with Josh represent. The warmth of these relationships provides a salve for the coldness of the world around him.

The narrator’s motivation is his quest to learn the truth about what happened to him when he was a child. As he states in Chapter 1, his distance from those events limits his capacity to remember them accurately and clearly.