Power, doom, and hope

Note: This blog post may contain spoilers.

For the reader who asked: What's the matter with the leader?

Power

A major theme in Paper Stones is power. Misuse of power fails everybody multiple times in the book.

We see a boss, boyfriends, mothers and fathers, a husband, and even a therapist, misusing power and authority.

But the power-abusers themselves have no power. They are just rocks in what narrator Rose calls "the rockslide", careening down through time. They have been smashed themselves and their helpless trajectory sends them smashing into the next person.

The only people who have any free agency are in one of two groups. They are either people who have never been terribly injured (like Dave and his folks) or they are people who acknowledge that they have been injured and make huge conscious efforts to learn and heal and get themselves out of the rockslide (like Rose and her friends).

Doom and Hope

The book is preoccupied with a long view of time. Human heritage, from cave days on, is seen as a sort of doom and the future is seen as very hard to alter.

But not impossible. This is a book with a hopeful core. It is full of love, friendship, learning, growth, imagination, luck, vision, and hope. It shows life offering another chance and another chance, like morning coming every day.

Real power, in the sense of shaping one's own destiny and initiating a new legacy for one's children, is seen as possible, through these things.