73 pages • 2 hours read
Ellie TerryForget Me Not
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Novel in Verse
Calli’s perspective is written in first-person free verse, while Jinsong’s is written in first-person prose. Free verse is a style of poetry without a defined meter or rhyme scheme. Each of Calli’s chapters is a titled, self-contained poem. Some of the poems are concrete poems: The words are designed in a shape on the page that mirrors the content of the poem. Free verse focuses the reader on Calli’s thoughts and sensations without an imposed form and with more rhythmic variety than prose, serving the larger goal of the text to give readers insight into the experience of a person with Tourette syndrome.
Calli’s voice is distinct from others in the story because she is the only one who communicates in verse. This symbolizes how Calli feels categorically different from everyone else; however, just as poetry follows different rules than prose, so do Calli’s neurodiverse thoughts and behaviors simply follow different rules than her neurotypical friends.
Imagery
Within Calli’s poem chapters, Terry uses imagery to immerse the reader in the visuals of the setting and in Calli’s perspective. For example, when she describes driving into St. George, Utah, Calli sees “bright blue skies, / hills the color of rust / speckled by sagebrush” (10). She uses imagery to describe her tics, such as, “wiggle my nose / pucker my lips / roll my eyes / clear my throat” (30) and sound imagery such as “forwardbackup! / forwardbackup! / clap-clap! / tip-tap!” (159). These vivid images prompt the reader to visualize and hear the patterns and feelings that compel Calli’s tics. Terry’s use of imagery reflects Calli’s active imagination and supports the book’s goal to help readers understand the experience of living with Tourette syndrome.
Metaphor
A metaphor is a comparison between two things where the first is said to “be” the second. A metaphor’s effectiveness comes from highlighting the ways in which two disparate objects or experiences are similar. Terry uses metaphor to demonstrate a character’s emotion to the reader. For example, when Calli describes the feeling of kissing Jinsong, she says she is “flitting / floating / flying / up / up / up into the sky” (285). Calli is not literally flying, but the emotion she feels is similar to flying in that she feels light and out of her body. When Calli and Jinsong are fighting, Jinsong calls himself “a ghost” because “[Calli] can see right through [him]” (200). The metaphor both conveys the characters’ feelings to the reader through familiar images but also reflects the child characters’ inabilities as yet to fully understand and directly share their emotions.
