The Children - Facts

 The family in this novel live in Connecticut. Connecticut is a U.S. state in southern New England that has a mix of coastal cities and rural areas dotted with small towns.

Whit was keen on American bluegrass music. Bluegrass music is a genre of American roots music that developed in the 1940s in the Appalachian region of the United States.

Charlotte writes a blog, but she also writes listicles for some other sites. In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item.

Sally says that Whit was obsessed with Plato's the myth of the cave. Plato describes people that have spent their lives chained in a cave facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected onto the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The shadows are the prisoners' reality but not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.