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60. Here Now; Madeline’s Dictionary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Everything, Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
Trust and Lies
Family, Abuse, and Bravery
The Value of Experience
Summary
Analysis
Their hotel is right on the beach, and greeters give Olly and Maddy each a lei. At the check-in counter, the woman welcomes them as Mr. and Mrs. Whittier and tells them to enjoy their honeymoon with a wink. Olly grins wildly. In their room, Maddy looks around and realizes there’s no bed. Olly reaches for what Maddy thought was an enormous closet and pulls down a Murphy bed, which surprises Maddy. He notes that there’s only one bed and stares at her in a way that makes her blush. To cover up the awkward silence, Olly fishes in Maddy’s backpack for her guidebook, but pulls out The Little Prince instead. He notes that when he read it as a sophomore, he didn’t understand it. Maddy suggests he try again, as the meaning changes every time.
When Maddy asserts that the meaning of The Little Prince changes over time, it shows that she does recognize that as people mature, they naturally change and think of things differently—an unexpected viewpoint, given how frozen in time Maddy seems in many other ways. Saying it now, however, suggests that Maddy is becoming more aware of the ways in which she’s changing, especially as she stares down a night in shared bed with Olly.
Themes
Olly takes the book to the bed, ascertains that Maddy has read it more than 20 times, and opens it to where Maddy wrote possible rewards for someone who finds the book. She offers a visit with her to a used bookstore and snorkeling with her to find the Hawaiian state fish. Olly asks when Maddy wrote this, but as Maddy starts to climb onto the bed, she experiences vertigo and her heart squeezes painfully. Olly is concerned, but Maddy realizes she’s just very hungry—she’s barely eaten in 24 hours. Olly laughs and Maddy laughs with him. She ignores her heart squeezing again.
Because of the way that Maddy grew up, she’s had lots of time to imagine doing something like this, hence the more fantastical options in her list of rewards for finding her book. This suggests that Maddy’s trip is really one that she’s wanted to take for a long time, even if she wasn’t entirely aware that’s what she wanted. This positions this trip as something somewhat inevitable in terms of Maddy’s coming of age process.
Themes
