Savvy

Bobby Meeks, the preacher’s daughter, is 16 and rebellious, with a small ring piercing her eyebrow and a studied look of boredom when she visits the Beaumonts. She takes an interest in Rocket but thinks little of Mibs. On her 13th birthday, Mibs suddenly hears Bobbi’s angel tattoo talking about the teen’s loneliness. Mibs soon understands that Bobbi is a much deeper and more sensitive person she pretends to be. Bobbi and Mibs bond over Mibs’s mind-reading ability, and they conspire to help Bobbi befriend Rocket. Bobbi is an important character and ally of Mibs who breaks out of her pouty, tough-girl facade to become the gifted, caring, and competent friend she’s long kept under wraps.

Mibs, Will, Bobbi, Fish, and Samson stow away in an old school bus used as a Bible delivery truck. The driver is Lester Swan, a dim-witted but well-intentioned man whose arm tattoos—which honor his mother, Rhonda, and his ex-girlfriend, Carlene—appear to Mibs as two women who constantly argue, blaming each other for Lester’s failures. The tattoos reflect Lester’s intense self-doubt, which disables him in daily life. Only when Lill brings out the best in Lester does he begin to exhibit his better qualities and evolve away from the debilitating influence of Rhonda and Carlene. Lester is an important character, a source of comic relief, and an object lesson in the importance of Seeing Past the Differences in Others.

Lill Kiteley is a waitress at a truck-stop diner. She’s terrific with people but tends to be late to work, and she thus gets fired from her job during the bus trek. She becomes a surrogate mother to the stowaways, tending to their minor injuries, bringing them food and useful items, and encouraging them with wisdom and affection. She also falls for Lester and quickly brings out his best qualities. Lill reads people easily, and she responds to them with helpful kindness. Her example influences Mibs, who learns from Lill that knowing other people’s feelings isn’t a burden but an opportunity for caring and compassion.

Lill’s effect on the kids and Lester causes the plot to arc away from disaster and toward a satisfying resolution. Introduced arbitrarily partway through the bus trip, Lill serves the plot as a kind of guardian angel who drops in and makes things better. Partly with Lill’s help, Mibs is able to guide the bus trip toward its proper terminus at Poppa’s hospital.

Will Junior is raised by the Meeks. He’s a bit proper, but he likes Mibs and shows her kindness. He wants to grow up to be a cleric like Pastor Meeks, but, as a stowaway, he loosens up and shows a naturally good nature and compassion, especially for Mibs. He finds in her, and in their bus trek, the people and adventure he longs for. Along with sister Bobbi, Will burgeons in the freedom of the open road and glories in the liberty he feels when away from the tight restrictions of his parents’ regime.

Will has a secret: Pastor and Rosemary Meeks are his grandparents, and the Meeks’s son Bill is Will’s real father. The novel doesn’t detail this odd arrangement, but Will and Bill reunite happily near the end of the story. Will’s secret helps him sympathize with Mibs, and she with him, which draws them closer together.

Like Poppa, Will is an outsider who appreciates people with savvies and fits in well with Mibs and her family. He’s immediately her ally, though it takes her some time to realize it. Will is honest, sincere, and cheerful—in short, a Boy Scout type with a religious bent but also a sense of good-natured mischief and none of his parents' strident, rule-bound uptightness. Will serves the story as Mibs’s potential love interest, which forces her to ponder that very important issue of the teen years.

When Fish turned 13, he acquired the savvy to cause raging storms. This forced the Beaumonts to move far inland, away from their beach home and the ocean, which Fish can convert into swirling hurricanes. Fish has trouble managing his anger; he’s fiercely protective of his family members and feels threatened by outsider Will’s dangerous interest in Mibs. Fish and Will initially fight but slowly realize they’re on the same side and become friends. During the bus trip, Fish finally gets a good handle on his savvy; his growing skill proves superior to that of his older brother, Rocket, who still struggles to control his savvy.

Two of the voices in Mibs’s head come from a pair of tattoos, one on each forearm, worn by Lester Swan. One tattoo says “Rhonda” beneath a heart inscribed with “Mom,” and the other says “Carlene” above a thorny rose. From Mibs’s perspective, the tats morph into the faces of the two women, who constantly argue about how stupid Lester is and which of them is more at fault for it. A typical back-and-forth is:

‘What’s the half-baked idiot thinking? Lester should have his head examined,’ Rhonda was saying from Lester’s left arm. ‘How could any son of mine turn out to be such a namby-pamby?’ ‘What he should do is leave these rotten kids on the side of the road, the same way I ditched that mangy dog of his when the beast chewed up my best red shoes,’ said Carlene from his right. ‘Instead the dolt bandages their boo-boos and pats them on the head’ (113).

The ongoing dialogue makes clear that the two women’s opinions have become Lester’s own, which is a main source of Lester’s fearful behavior.

The main antagonist of the story, Carlene is Lester’s abusive ex-girlfriend. She’s a “big woman in a little woman’s body. She ha[s] big hair, big teeth, big long fingernails […], but the rest of her [i]s hollow and shrunken and bony” (258). She appears near the novel's end, but she’s represented during the bus trip by a “Carlene” tattoo on Lester’s arm that speaks a continuous screed of disparaging comments about him. She gave Lester his job with her Bible delivery business, but she abuses him verbally, forces him to give most of his earnings to her, and holds him in place with the threat of firing him if he doesn’t cooperate.

When Carlene learns that Lester is harboring missing children, she at once calls the police. She also kidnaps and hides Samson but gets her comeuppance when the authorities arrive and learn about the kidnapping. Carlene serves the plot as the chief obstacle to Mibs’s quest to reach her comatose father. With Lester, she’s also an object lesson about people who use contempt to victimize others.

Samson is seven and “broody.” He keeps to himself, disappearing as if by magic and reappearing later when he’s likely to touch someone who’s suffering and give them a sudden surge of strength. Samson is too young to have a savvy, but his family believes he’s already manifesting a weak version of it with his calming, uplifting presence. Samson’s disappearance at Carlene’s house becomes the fulcrum of a major plot point; he’s rescued when he cleverly draws ink designs on his arms so that Mibs can hear his thoughts and locate him.

Samson narrates the book’s epilogue, in which, five years after Mibs’s 13th birthday, he acquires his savvy in two parts. One part dispenses great amounts of power to others; in this respect, he lives up to his namesake, Samson, the physically powerful Biblical military ruler who could topple buildings with his bare hands.

Momma, Mibs’s mother, does everything perfectly; it’s her savvy to do so: “Even when she messe[s] up, Momma messe[s] up perfectly” (5). Momma adores and dotes on her children; they love her back equally. She sets a perfect example as a mother, but she insists she merely has “a knack for getting things right” (97). She teaches Mibs that a savvy is just an unusual part of an otherwise normal life. Momma is a minor character, but she looms large and lovingly in her children's minds.

Poppa is the beloved father of Mibs and her siblings. He’s not from a family with savvies, but he has great determination: “Poppa never g[ives] up on anything once he set[s] his mind to it” (127). Mibs reminds him of that quality when she convinces him, through his tattoo, to return to consciousness and rejoin his family. Though a minor character, Poppa has a major influence on the plot: Mibs’s effort to visit him at the hospital powers the storyline.

Rocket, the eldest Beaumont child at 17, can control electric power. Like Fish, who creates weather storms when upset, Rocket generates electrical surges when he feels strong emotions; these sometimes knock out power to entire neighborhoods. Rocket moves to Wyoming to keep his electrical superpower away from population centers. Though a minor character, Rocket attracts the interest of Bobbi Meeks, who befriends him late in the story. Rocket’s ongoing struggle to control his savvy is a warning to Fish and Mibs, who also must master powers that can be dangerous if misused.

Grandpa Bomba can move land around. For newlyweds Momma and Poppa, he created the Beaumont compound on the Kansas-Nebraska border by stretching the earth and making “six acres of land on which to build a house” (128). When he’s upset or sad, the earth beneath him rumbles, sometimes “buckling the sidewalks and pushing the neighbor’s lawn ornaments into the next yard over” (121-22). Grandpa’s wise counsel, especially that savvies are simply abilities that can be used well or badly, helps Mibs learn to deal with her power. His sadness over the recent loss of his wife charges the story and Mibs’s awareness of the tense possibility that Poppa, too, might die.

Bill Meeks is a state trooper and the father of Will Junior. A troublemaker in his youth, Bill left Will with Pastor and Rosemary Meeks, who are raising the boy. Bill straightened up, but Will continues to live with the pastor’s family. Bill appears late in the story as a deus ex machina who clears up the law-enforcement tangle surrounding the bus group’s detention; this redeems Lester and Lill and permits the entire group to continue together to the hospital.

Gypsy, age three, is the youngest Beaumont. She “always surround[s] herself with fluff and fuzz. She like[s] her toddler world to be soft and smooth, with no hard edges or rough seams” (36). Gypsy invented her older sister’s nickname, Mibs, because she couldn’t pronounce the full name, Mississippi. Gypsy is a minor character in Savvy, but she becomes the main character in the book’s second sequel, Switch, when she acquires her own savvy—the ability to stop time.

The preacher’s wife, Miss Rosemary, sometimes babysits the young Beaumonts. She’s a bit stuffy, orders the children about, and likes to clean up their kitchen. She insists that Mibs will have a public birthday party, which turns into a fiasco. Her daughter, Bobbi, and son, Bill, are alienated from her family. In following her beliefs about proper behavior too carefully, Rosemary alienates the very people she’d like to impress. Her character is a lesson in the pitfalls of being too focused on the rules, rather than the spirit, of social relationships.