Betty

Content Warning: This section mentions depression, self-harm, attempted suicide, child sexual abuse and rape, termination of a pregnancy, drug overdose, and death.

For the three sisters, A Faraway Place symbolizes hopes and dreams. Landon builds the stage because Cherokee women always built stages on which they would sing to scare off predators and nourish the garden. The existence of the stage is an expression of Landon’s hope to carry on his culture and traditions. The girls name it A Faraway Place to signify that it feels like an entirely different world in which they can make art, play, and live out their dreams. Describing the power of A Faraway Place, Betty says that “the whole world [i]s right there and it [i]s large enough for the dreams of three girls” (69). They do impossible things there, like resurrect the dead, ride on the backs of flying birds, and share a single imagination.

As the realities of adulthood begin to intrude on their worlds, the girls turn to A Faraway Place for comfort and hope. When their mother cuts her wrists, Fraya cuts two slits into the stage in the hope that it will heal their mother. When Fraya cuts her wrist, Betty cuts the stage again. Fraya sings at A Faraway Place the night she tries to use bark to end her pregnancy. A Faraway Place is where Betty spends her time writing, dreaming of different worlds and hoping for different futures, and it is where she buries the stories of the women in her family. It is where Fraya keeps the shotgun she uses to shoot at the sky at night. A Faraway Place belongs to the three sisters as a corner of the world where they can be free of men. In the final chapter, when Alka asks Betty where she’ll go when she leaves Breathed, Betty tells her mother that she is going to “a faraway place” (461). By leaving her town, she begins to pursue the hopes and dreams that she held as a child with her sisters.