Third post...

How and why Wendy matures: Passages...
"I didn't own sunglasses because, in Rochester, there's only about five days in the whole year that you need sunglasses- and the majority of those days are for snow glare rather than actual sunlight. The eye doctore had offereed my a pair of construction-paper-and-plastic-film sunglasses about as classy as the ones you get at the 3-D attractions at Disney World, except without the Disney characters. You'd think for what an eye doctor charges, he could give you glasses that don't look as though they cost about fourteen cents a gross (Velde 6)."
This is Wendy at the beginning of the story- sarcastic, unthoughtful of others, oppionated, etc. One of the typical views people think of when they think of teenagers.
Another passage:
"'She hasn't chosen this,' Julian said. 'Sometimes bravery and strength and goodness just aren't enough.'
It wasn't like I was greedy. It wasn't like I expected she should live forever.
'And I don't know about your father, but I suspect if he's chose a life without you, it was not an easy choice; and it was probably not a choice against you, but for something else.'
Sometimes, I reminded myself, you just have to let go.
I rubbed the tears away. I would do the right thing, I decided: I would forgive my father for choosing another woman over my mother and me; I would forgive my mother for choosing another man after my father and in addition to me; I would forgive my grandmother for leaving me; and I would forgive myself for not being the person I wanted to be, though I would try harder to be that person (Velde 270)."
Now, this is Wendy almost at the very end of the book. Here she sounds forgiving, kindhearted, sincere, loving, etc. She sounds like everything she wasn't in the other passage. In the second passage, Wendy recognizes that everything won't stay the same her whole life and that there is nothing she can do to control other people's choices- when at the beginning of the book she had been the total opposite. She didn't like that her mother had chosen to remarried, she didn't like that her grandmother was dying right in front of her and that for both of these things there was absolutely nothing she could do (in other words she was fighting a losing battle). At the end of the book on the other hand, she realizes that she can't do anything to change what's happening and what's occuring around her except for herself and she accepts that.
-katthegreat08