Character Overview
Rhoda Penmark is an eight-year-old girl who, in the course of the novel, murders a classmate and a groundskeeper who suspects her. It is also revealed that she murdered an elderly neighbor the year before. Despite coming from a loving home, she is a sociopath who is willing to kill to get what she wants. She is also a precociously talented con artist, adept at using a sweet, innocent façade to mask her true self from adults so they will give in to her. Her tricks do not work on other children, who sense who she truly is and avoid her.
March writes that Rhoda's evil is genetic; her maternal grandmother was a serial killer, who also began killing at a young age (Rhoda's mother, Christine, was adopted at a very young age and so doesn't remember her real parents).
Read more about this topic: Rhoda Penmark
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)