Drama

"All this effort, all this planning, just to upset my dearest friend. So what if she'd fibbed a little about her pencil case? pg 60

Ruth and Kathy have girl drama all throughout chapters four and five. They fight over things like pencil cases and fantasy roleplaying, and they take a long time to get over their actions. Ruth is a frustrating character. She's the girl that everyone looks up to for advice and answers, and because of that she can be kind of snobby and she tends to hold grudges.

I just want to take this moment to say how different this novel is from Brave New World. Firstly, the children in this novel actually have a childhood, and they are not spending their time in a human factory. Secondly, human emotions exist at Hailsham, because we see Kathy get mad at Ruth, and Ruth mad at Kathy, and all that drama. In the utopia, the citizens had little emotion, and drank soma to get rid of unpleasant thoughts. Thirdly, the students at Hailsham are aware that there is something going on with their lives, they just don't seem to know all the details, unlike the citizens in Brave New World, who pretty much just accepted life the way it was, since they were conditioned. Aside from the differences, the two novels are similar because they raise humans for specific purposes. In this novel, they are raised for human donations, while in Brave New World, they are either Deltas, Gammas, Alphas, or robots for that matter, that succumbed into conformist thinking. I'm sure more differences, and possibly similarities for that matter, will arise as I read further.