Characterization of Lucy Cooke
The sin bin or Lucy’s heart is about a girl named Lucy Cooke, she is in her teens, and she is one of the best students at her school “last year I came in second in the year” (page 36, line 11). The reader is told in the beginning of the story that she has detention because she punched another girl at school whose name was Penny Jones. The reason she hit that girl, was because her best friend, Bethan, asked her to do so, even though Lucy did not entirely understand why, she still did it. Lucy seems like a proud girl, and she loves the fact that she is so good at her studies but as the story goes on, it becomes more and more clear to the reader that she is not exactly strong-willed since she lets Bethan control her like she does. But this unreasonable behavior could be because Lucy does not want to be left out at school; maybe she believes that the friends are worth so much more than her studies that she “needs” those friends. When you are reading this story, you automatically think that Lucy seems like this reserved, brainy and shy type of girl, that nobody really likes. When Lucy were about to hit Penny, she hesitated, no doubt about that, what could Lucy’s feelings be toward Penny? Maybe she likes Penny because Lucy knows that they are the same type of person, they are both smart, and love to go to school, the only difference is that Lucy cares way more about being popular, and Penny does not. I think that Lucy’s relationship to her mother, is not a “good” kind of mother/daughter relationship, her mother seems extremely dominating and will not let anything corrupt her child, not friends, but certainly not private schools