The Sympathetic Parent

You guys are my sanity.

What do you make of this? (I won't tell you how much research I went through for these paltry paragraphs!)

Penpa is in a melancholic mood. She's feeling claustrophobic; she wants out.

I'm looking at her responsibilities and routine and growing unrest from third person limited (Blinky) and then easing out with a third person omniscient (which bridges across to Penpa's third person limited in the passage that follows). In this way, I'm attempting to place the reader temporarily into a sympathetic parental role. Furthermore, I want to avoid any idea that Penpa is feeling sorry for herself (for the moment).

Does it work?

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Blinky's nose twitched. Breakfast was ready.

He pawed away the last of his dream butterflies and yawned and stretched, and then dropped from the bed and scuttled around the pot-bellied stove and sprang onto his stool at Penpa's side. She had prepared two bowls of baby freshwater clams and boiled ptarmigan eggs; but she had not touched a morsel.

She had shouldered a yoke laden with pails of water from the stream down-mountain to the lighthouse; she had harvested the clams and removed their beards and steamed them; she had scouted the rocks for snow-white eggs, invisible upon the snow-white banks; she had gathered kindling and firewood into a sling and lit the stove with sparks from her tinderbox; and now she would not eat the fruit of her labours.

Naturally, Blinky had helped out, but still he eyed her ruefully as he gulped down the clams.

Penpa had barely eaten for a season since they had encountered the nomads. She gazed through the large, oval window. Watery sunlight spread her silhouette over the exquisitely carved beams and onto the domed ceiling of the bedchamber. A wistful intensity blazed in her narrow eyes, like that of a child endlessly fascinated and constantly surprised by the magic of the world.

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