The increasingly unbearable heat in Macedonia is emblematic of the increasing interpersonal, sexual, and class tensions in the narrative. The rising heat marks the growing passion between Jottie and Sol and between Layla and Felix. It symbolizes Willa’s burgeoning womanhood and ill-defined sexuality and also charts the rising dissatisfaction of the workers at the factory and the looming threat of violence. The first signs of autumn emerge after Felix’s lies are exposed and as Jottie’s relationship with Sol cools and the situation at the factory calms down: “It was getting to be the end of summer. You could feel it happening. Not that it wasn’t hot; it was—sweltering, even, in the afternoons. But it wasn’t crushing anymore” (450).

For Willa, books are a way of reaching outside of her own narrow world, experiencing and seeking to make sense of the mysterious world of adults, and seeking to understand the changes that she herself is undergoing.

In Chapter 20, she discovers Jane Eyre—another novel in which the heroine passes from girlhood to adulthood and uncovers a dark secret. Later on in the novel, Willa is particularly drawn to those books that are forbidden to her—Gone With the Wind, Crime and Punishment, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Private Worlds.