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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the novel's most sustained interior view of Kate Barlow. Sachar gives us her auditory hallucination ('Onions! Sweet fresh onions'), her self-diagnosis ('She knew she was crazy'), and then her grief liturgy — the fourfold repetition of 'cold.' The paragraph shows how a specific, plot-level loss (Sam) becomes a generalized sensory condition (cold hands, cold feet, cold face, cold heart). Notice that the second half of the chapter's interior paragraph follows — Sam answers 'I can fix that' — but Sachar withholds it here so the cold stands alone.
Sometimes she could hear Sam's voice echoing across the emptiness. "Onions! Sweet fresh onions." She knew she was crazy. She knew she'd been crazy for the last twenty years. "Oh, Sam," she would say, ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Narrate Chapter 28 with an eye to Sachar's structural echoes. Pay attention to how the chapter opens (Kate returning to a wasteland she helped create by being unable to leave) and how it closes (Kate giving Trout a wasteland of his own). Trace the moments where the 'curse on the Walker family' moves from prophecy to mechanism.
Discussion Questions
- Examine Sachar's decision to give Kate an auditory hallucination — 'Sam's voice echoing across the emptiness' calling 'Onions! Sweet fresh onions' — rather than, say, a vivid memory or a dream. What is the difference between a hallucination and a memory as a narrative device, and what does Sachar gain by making Kate's grief hallucinatory rather than mnemonic?
- Linda Miller, once Kate's fourth-grade student with 'beautiful red hair,' now helps Trout drag Kate barefoot across hot sand while hitting her with a shovel. Trace the causal chain that turned a child in Kate's classroom into Kate's torturer. Whose fault is Linda Walker? Her own? Trout's? The town's? Kate's? God's? Construct the strongest possible case for one answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A sound repeating or lingering in a space, often from a voice or noise reflecting off distant surfaces.
Item 2
The condition of having nothing in it — no people, no sound, no content — often felt as loneliness.
Item 3
Saying words aloud, even when no one may be listening.
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Critical Thinking
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