Isolation: From the start of the novel, we know that Margaret is an isolated child. She has "no siblings" and her relationship with her mother isn't a strong and loving one. Margaret's retreat from the world would have left her feeling unbearably isolated if she did not have the indirect human contact made through reading. And it is reading that is able to make her withdraw into herself as she does yet it also brings her back out. Reading "Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation" takes her to Miss Winter and then to Aurelius. Her isolation found in reading, enables her to have a more open relationship with her father and contemplating changes of an even greater kind.