Yoon uses colors symbolically throughout the book. At the story’s beginning, Madeline is associated strongly with the color white: She has white cake and frosting for her birthday, she eats white bean soup with white napkins, and she exclusively wears white t-shirts and white Keds. Madeline becomes less associated with white as the story progresses because it symbolizes Pauline’s control over her: “I know she’s not upset that I bought new clothes. She’s upset that I didn’t ask her opinion and bought them in colors that she didn’t expect. She’s upset with the change she didn’t see coming” (114). Madeline eventually buys colorful clothes and paints her bedroom many colors, rejecting the sterility imposed by her mother. Moreover, Olly dresses almost all in black, symbolizing both his difference from Madeline and his status as someone outside the family’s hierarchy. When he and Madeline reunite at the end of the book, he wears a gray t-shirt, symbolizing that he too has experienced change and transformation.

The body is a symbol of physical security and a deeper involvement in the world. At the beginning of the story, Madeline places faux food in front of an astronaut figurine in her architecture model, and her tutor bemusedly asks how the figurine will “eat” the food with its helmet on.