This novel shows the imbalance of Jamaican politics, the imbalance of American politics, and the narrow bandwidth that Clare's family is left with. They are simply assaulted by systemic injustice, and a reader with an eye for intersectionality is likely to notice that Clare has been abandoned by her mother, is living with a single father, as a Black person during the end of segregation, and she is an immigrant whose home country has been ravaged by criminal enterprise.
Her life is hard. But in the end, she selects a cause to die for, in some senses, combining the horror of combat (like Bobby), with her hope for justice in Jamaica, which is demonstrated by her joining the resistance. She ends up being a martyr for Jamaica, as if to say that the origin of her brokenness is the broken history of Jamaica, which like America, is riddled by the horror of slavery and exploitative colonization.
The novel begins and ends in the woods, which is interesting, because her name is also Savage, which is good cause to suspect that another unspoken premise is being obeyed: Clare is never not in defense mode. The novel suggests that Clare's life is difficult enough, emotionally and otherwise, that her brain got stuck in crisis mode early on, and it has never been unstuck since. In a way, she manifests the reality she predicted through paranoia, when she takes guns to fight the bad guys in Jamaican wilderness.
