Character Analysis
Parental Units
It takes a village to raise a child. The West family is pretty isolated, so they don't have a village. Instead, Dad makes a list of "Rules to Live By" for Will to, you know, live by. There are 98 of them, rules like "#8: ALWAYS BE PREPARED TO IMPROVISE"; "#68: NEVER SIGN A LEGAL DOCUMENT THAT HASN'T BEEN APPROVED BY A LAWYER WHO WORKS FOR YOU"; and "#96: MEMORIZE THE BILL OF RIGHTS."
Why all these rules? Why 98 of them? We have no idea. We never actually see Dad in person in this book. He texts Will, and we see a video of him, but he seems to rely on these rules to do his parenting for him.
And what about Mom? She is a "committed hugger" (1.15). And…that's all we know about her. She likes to hug, and she breaks spaghetti in half before putting it into the pot. There's Mom in a nutshell.
Will must not be a hugger, incidentally, because he never seems all that concerned that Mom is taken over by a brain-eating parasite.
Will does want to rescue Dad, although he fails to do so during the course of this book. At the end, it turns out that Dad is really Hugh Greenwood, not Jordan West—which means he is part of the family who founded the Center. He may have genetically engineered Will, but for what means? This is pretty shady behavior if you ask us, but Will's unflagging loyalty to his father has yet to diminish. Will it change in future books? We'll have to wait and see.