SO Evil. I am sure she was the one to take the tape, and the way she sabotaged Tommy and Kathy. SO evil. She lends some credence to the soulless-hypothesis.

She becomes a little more nuanced, but I never managed to warm to her. I suppose her horrible selfishness and spite is thrown into high relieff because of the short amount of time they have, and the impossibility of staving it off.

Kathy sometimes annoyed me, mainly for being too nice to Ruth. She takes everything. I am surprised to find her so stoic, and I wonder whether it is due to the environment at Hailsham -- that the students we encounter all have different ways of coping with what they experience as an inevitable fate: Tommy has rage, Ruth some sort of delusional egocentricity, and Kathy goes stoic.

I came to sympathise with Miss Emily after a while. I saw the writing on the wall quite early on, and I immediately took to Miss Lucy; but having finished the book, I lean rather more towards Miss Emily and Madame. But I like how those two ways of looking at it is left open. And I like how the guardians' perspective is stated, but never fully explored: it is not the focus. The focus is the demonstration of individuality and "soul", I suppose. The "reality" of the children.