Sophie

Sophie is the heart of the story, an imaginative and restless adolescent who cannot reconcile herself to the ordinary future laid out for her. She is bright, spirited and full of longing, forever picturing herself in glamorous roles — a boutique owner, an actress, a fashion designer. Her chief trait is a powerful imagination that continually reshapes dull reality into something exciting. This makes her sympathetic and vivid, but it is also her weakness, because she gradually loses the ability to separate her fantasies from fact. Her invented meeting with Danny Casey begins perhaps as a small boast but grows until she seems half to believe it herself, and she ends by waiting hopelessly for a man who was never going to come. Sophie is not dishonest by nature so much as hungry for a la …