Marietta, aka Taylor, was raised in a small town in Kentucky. When she became an adult, she decided she needed a change and wanted to leave her hometown and overall her current life. This initially sparked the idea of growth because with change always comes some type of growth. She wanted a different name and a different place to call her home. This is significant because not only did she Just want to get away from where she was living, she wanted a full new name, creating a full new identity.
She was running away from family and everything she had known to be off on her own and to start a new community and life. During her Journey she came across a woman who gave her an Indian child and asked her to take care of the child then ran away. This could be considered the point in Tailor’s life where she was changed forever. Suddenly taking on the responsibility of a child obviously brings many changes to a person’s life. This is significant because to start off her new life and her new identity, she is defiantly starting off with something she has never encountered before.
Taylor, who is not used to motherhood or how to deal with a child, starts off as not the best parent but works to do the best that she can shows how she is willing to do whatever she has to because she is aware that she was looking for change and that was exactly what she got. This is why to one might believe the pivotal moment of Tailor’s growth comes later in the novel, because it was generally Just her realizing that things were going to change and that she had to deal with it because it is what she had chosen to do. Taylor then names this child Turtle ND they settle down in a town called Tucson.
Here in Tucson Taylor becomes a friend of a woman named Mattie who offers her house to refugees. Mattie is important in Tailor’s growth because she is one of the first friends that she makes when she first moves into the new town of Tucson. This new sense of a family and a community, which is what Taylor was looking for in the beginning of the book has a major influence on the decisions and actions that she takes later in the novel. Two of these refugees, Separates and Stefan, take a certain liking to Turtle because she emends them of their daughter who was taken from them.
This leads to them offering to act as Turtle’s parents so that they could sign over full custody to Taylor so that she would now be the actual legal guardian of Turtle. Separates is so heartbroken over giving Turtle away even though she was never actually hers because of the resemblance she saw between turtle and her lost daughter. Taylor then realizes that if they had offered to keep Turtle and raise her like their own she would have let them. But by Taylor accepting the role of the mother shows her Roth.
It shows her growth because in the beginning she was Just looking for a new life and wasn’t sure what she would find but now that she has this responsibility she wouldn’t trade, which we see when she accepted the role of mother, and she has achieved her goal of starting a family and a full new life away from her Kentucky one. Taylor was unsure of this decision but by the end she realizes that this is the life that she wants and Turtle is her new home and her family. Taylor has gone from a lost girl in the beginning of the novel, running away from mom with no real destination in mind.
To a woman who now has a child that she loves and cares for and who has given her the opportunity to have a family and be happy with her life and the community she has built around her. This shows the overall meaning of Kingfisher’s novel that one must accept the things that life gives you because everything happens for a reason. If Taylor had not been given Turtle, who knows where she would have ended up, in what town or what part of the world. She would have never achieved that new community sense and family that she had hoped for.
