Sophie Gee

So Conquita we think of as being the underdog, but Conquita turns out to be the character who's holding the power because she's the wealthy one.

And so she's the assassin.

She takes down Lee.

So in a certain sense, it turns out to be a kind of straightforward allegory.

But...

All the way through this chapter, we're getting to know more about Lee's sense of her own precarity, her own sense of not belonging to this world, exactly where her insecurity and anxiety comes from.

And there's quite a nice scene where assassin is being announced in the school assembly.

And we're introduced to this character called Adam Rabinowitz.

And Adam Rabinowitz turns out to be, well, this is the description of Adam Rabinowitz,

The second thing I knew about Adam also had in a way to do with sex.

In the fall, a plaster of Paris display had gone up in the art wing, a joint project by two senior girls who both wore sheer scarves around their necks and silver hoop earrings and lots of black, and who probably smoked or would start when they got to college.

They were serious about their art.

And that must have been why they were allowed to include in the display a variety of plaster body parts, including a breast or a penis.

The breast was never identified, but after great speculation, the dominant theory on campus was that the penis belonged to Adam Rabinowitz.

The third thing I knew about him, and this made the other two all the more interesting, was that supposedly he had the highest GPA in his class.

At any rate, he was headed to Yale.

So Adam Rabinowitz is this iconic character of Yale.

east coast privilege although it doesn't explicitly say so he's obviously jewish with the with the last name rabinowitz and he's from this kind of jewish elite that forms one half of the kind of elite white world of this book the other half being protestants the episcopal characters and there's a moment where the heroine is reflecting on what what she finds so fascinating but also kind of

repellent or horrifying about adam and this is what she says i wasn't thinking much about assassin what the announcement left me with mostly i couldn't have articulated that then and i might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it was the sense that i wanted to be adam rabinowitz the interest i felt in certain guys then confused me because it wasn't romantic i

But I wasn't sure what else it might be.