Alice in Wonderland
As always, Ally narration puts it best. The symbolic context of this famous literary character dropped into a world she can only barely comprehend becomes crystal clear exactly as Ally describes it, including her own italicized emphasis, when she observes of Lewis Carroll's fantasy tale:
“...a book about living in a world where nothing makes sense made perfect sense to me.”
Coins
Coins are a perfect symbol expressing the book’s theme that being different—which is a code word for “flawed”—sometimes makes things more valuable. A learning disability in one system becomes a mechanism for genius if unleashed into the right system. Ally’s brother Travis is the coin guy in the family and it is through him that she learns an interesting fact: a few coins minted with a flaw is worth exponentially more than all the “perfectly” minted coins that serve the purpose of society at large.
Mind Movies
Ally describes her interior fantasy life as “mind movies.” She informs the reader that this is her go-to way of critical thinking: “My mind does this all the time—shows me these movies that seem so real that they carry me away them. They are a relief from my real life.” What she means by that is not fantasies or daydreaming or mere illusion. The images which form inside her mind make a distinct and concrete connection to what is happening around her. They are her way of forming ideas that help connect the immediate context to a more expansive subtext. The mind movies for Ally are simply what most people think in more verbal terms. Thus, they are the symbolic demonstration of her the way her “disability” is actually just transformed into a less common, perhaps, ability.
Chess
soupChess is a symbol in the story on a more than just one level. For one thing, it is a game that has the obvious reference back to Ally’s kinship with Alice and that infamously not-normal game of chess played in Wonderland. More immediately, the spatial reasoning required to excel in chess proves that Ally is hardly the dummy she has allowed others to make her believe she must be due to her difficulty with reading. Chess also becomes the symbolic conduit through which Ally learns about dyslexia and through that knowledge learns it is not her that is disabled, but the educational system which adheres so blindly to standardized instruction. And, finally, chess is also used symbolically by Ally to delineate the hierarchy of the other students: Keisha is the powerful and bishop, Albert the king who is all-powerful yet moves sluggishly and, of course, rich snot Shay is the queen.
Soup Can
The ever-philosophical Ally chooses for herself a typically visually oriented symbol for how others perceive her. Not soup, per se, but the can itself. More precisely, the tangle ingredients listed on the label and those less tangible but no less significant elements that just can’t be compartmentalized so easily: “People act like…I'm a can of soup and they can just read the list of ingredients and know everything about me. There's a lot of stuff about the soup inside that they can't put on the label, like how it smells and tastes and makes you feel warm when you eat it. There's got to be more to me than a kid who can't read well.”
