Missing May Themes

Love determines all the characters' motives and actions in Missing May. To be clear, we're talking about familial love—like Summer's love for her adoptive parents, and Uncle Ob's love for his dec...

Little Summer doesn't exactly start out with a hunky dory Brady Bunch family structure in Missing May. She's an orphan and most of her immediate family isn't exactly thrilled to be taking on a...

Summer's pretty well set-up with Aunt May and Uncle Ob in Missing May, but that doesn't mean that she's not always looking over her shoulder. After all, she was essentially tossed around from one h...

Death is a really big factor in Missing May since the whole story revolves around how Summer and her uncle Ob deal with Aunt May's death. Summer isn't the kind of kid who runs around singing about...

Missing May is certainly not a story about skeptics. Pretty much all the main characters—from Cletus, to Uncle Ob, and even to Summer—take it as a fact of life that there are things that can't...

Oh, things are not going so well for Uncle Ob and Summer when Missing May begins—their loving, amazing May has died and the two of them are kind of adrift, stuck in a place of mourning. And it's...

Truth be told, Summer's already a little bit of an old soul in Missing May. She's not your typical twelve-year-old girl who's obsessed with Justin Bieber and painting her nails. No—our girl Summe...

Home is where the heart is, and that's especially true in Missing May. With the reverence that Summer describes her home with May and Ob, you'd think that they live in a mansion like royalty, but i...

Religion can often be a touchy subject, but in the world of Missing May it's just another thing that frames the way that the characters think. They all take the idea of God and heaven for granted,...

The characters in Missing May are people of modest means—after all, they come from a small town and don't have big shiny things like mansions and iPods to show off. But that doesn't mean that the...