Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Direct, Precocious, Scout Finch
If you've never met Scout Finch, narrator of Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird, get thee to Shmoop's character analysis pronto because Georgie Burkhardt is Scout's direct literary descendent. Both are super-smart tomboys who are not so impressed with the way the world around them works and are struggling to understand it. Also, neither of them is shy about expressing her dissatisfaction with the way things are nor with how adults handle things. Georgie, for example, resents the fact that all the adults in her life are trying to make her accept her sister's death:
If Ma had only wanted an apology for causing a scene at the funeral, I might have yielded. But she wanted me to voice my sorrow. She wanted me to say my sister was dead, deceased, perished, passed on. I would do no such thing. (4.3)
Georgie has an advanced vocabulary—we get the feeling she would be a school spelling bee champion in another time—so she often expresses things in a way that is, at the least, uncommon for a thirteen-year-old girl. We might say it's precocious—or prematurely mature. How's that for an oxymoron? For an example of this, check out the final paragraph:
I say let all the earth be alive and overwhelmingly so. Let the sky be pressed to bursting with wings, beaks, pumping hearts, and driving muscles. Let it be noisy. Let it make a mess. Then let me find my allotted space. Let me feel how I bump up against every other living thing on this earth. Let me learn to spin. (24.69)
Profound, right? In many ways, Georgie sounds like a much older character here, which is where the whole precocious tone comes in.