The Probability of Mircales
By: Wendy Wunder
Genre
The genre of the book is realistic fiction and contemporary. Realistic fiction consists of stories that could have actually occurred to people or animals in a believable setting. These stories resemble real life, and fictional characters within these stories react similarly to real people.
Theme
The theme of the story is that there is hope and miracles for everyone and you should believe in miracles, Campbell learns this after going through and seeing everything that happened in Maine and she turned out to believe in herself, love, in miracles, and realizes she has/had a wonderful life.
Protagonist
The protagonist in the story is Cambell Cooper, but her nickname is Cam. She has had cancer for the last five years and is 17 years old. Cam doesn't believe in miracles and thinks that it's her time to finally die, but that idea changes once they move to Promise, Maine. Campbell has a very dry and sarcastic sense of humor, which you see when she is marking things off of the Flamingo List, a list of things for her to do before she dies.
Antagonist
The antagonist in the story is Campbell's cancer. During the beginning of the story the reader learns that her cancer has gotten worse and is described as "lighting up like a Christmas tree". The cancer doesn't exactly overtake her life as to where that is all she dwells on, but it makes her have a lot of bad moments where she gets weak and faints or she has really bad pain in her stomach area, and it prevents her from doing the things she enjoys or the things she wants to do.
Main Character
The main character in the story is Campbell. Campbell's strengths include that she is courageous by fulfilling the Flamingo List and battling cancer. Even though her cancer has taken over a lot of her body she is still sarcastic and cold but at the same time vibrant and full of life to where it seem like she still wants to live, and obviously she does. "Clear bags of menacing-looking fluids hung from the IV poles their arms were bruised with "tracks" from being poked so many times. Still they smiled." Closer to the beginning of the book Cam is a bit melancholy, nonchalant, stubborn, and doesn't believe she has much of a future, but when she moves to Maine she becomes more optimistic about the future. Her weaknesses were that she was melancholy, nonchalant, and stubborn because her mom would get kind of mad at her because she wouldn't think of the good things in her life and she would also be quite negative most of the time and she wouldn't really do much and her mom wanted to fix the things.
Setting
The setting at the beginning of the story where they lived before they moved (Orlando, Florida) didn't really impact the story as much as it did when they moved to Promise, Maine. The reason they moved there was because her doctor had told her that she needed a miracle to survive her cancer, although Cam did not belief in miracles, her mom did, and so her mom moved the family to Maine believing that there is hope and a miracle for her daughter. A lot of events happened while they were in Maine that changed Cam's mind like the sunsets that lasted forever, the flamingos that visited often, her family, and a guy she met named Asher did that for her.
Conflicts
The internal conflicts of the story were that Cam was too scared to come out of her shell to realize the wonderful thing that were going on around her, and it was like she was afraid to admit that life is actually really great because she is in fear of loosing it. One of the external conflicts is the events the Flamingo List caused. The climax of the story was when they had finally gotten to Promise but they kept getting lost in the roads until they stumbled upon a beach view, but then things were getting strange, when they had tried to turn back they just kept getting stuck at the same place and it was like they were trapped in the city of Promise. The resolution was that her cancer had came back worse than ever and she ended up being hospitalized. Her mother, sister, and grandmother sat with her the whole time, and she couldn't "leave" because she was holding onto something but she didn't know what it was for sure.
Opinion
I really liked this book and I feel like it was like an off-braned type of The Fault in Our Stars where it had more adventure and sarcasm in it and where it had more of an out-of-the-box scene of Promise, Maine and how it was so vivid and I could connect more with the main character. It was also more light-hearted.