Critical Analysis Of Mosquitoland

For summer reading this year, I read Mosquitoland, by David Arnold, about a girl’s adventure cross-country. Though it seems to her in the beginning that her goal is to reunite with her sickly mother and get away from her new life in “Mosquitoland,” as the story progresses, the main character Mim discovers new perspectives about herself and her family that she previously had never considered. While she does achieve her initial goal of finding her mother, she learned more from the adventure than its end; as new perspectives were introduced to her, she changed, and learned that things are not always exactly how she sees them.

The most important change that Mim gains while travelling the 947 miles from Mississippi to Ohio is a strong sense of empathy. After moving with her dad and new stepmom away from her her sick mother, she refuses to see the
Before her adventure, she frequently interrupted the people she disagreed with with sarcasm. During an appointment with a new psychiatrist, she cuts him off mid-sentence and makes fun of him: “I slapped the cards down on the desk, then held up both middle fingers. ‘Tell me what you see here, Doc’” (25). Mim had already made her assumption about the doctor, so impolitely “slapped” away what was trying to be used to help her, and used vulgar sarcasm to deflect his attempts at civility. Instead of giving him a chance to help her, her sarcasm acts as a barrier keeping anything from reaching her. Near the end of the journey, when Walt presents her with a stick drawing, she says, “Walt, it’s an absolute masterpiece. Every twiggy inch’” (309). Instead of brushing it aside as she would have in the beginning by making fun of its imperfections, she is extremely genuine when she calls it a “masterpiece;” Mim learns to finally speak with genuine