Characters
- Peg: Main character and narrator of the story, diagnosed with polio.
- Karen: Peg's best friend at school
- Tommy: Peg's hospital roommate at University Hospital, in an iron lung.
- Renee: Sheltering Arms roommate, goes home for Christmas.
- Shirley: Sheltering Arms roommate, who has the most trouble with polio.
- Alice: Sheltering Arms roommate, who has been there for ten years. Her parents didn't want to take care of her because she was so badly crippled, and she became a ward of the state.
- Dorothy: Sheltering Arms roommate, who strives to be in leg braces to go home. Is able to return home, because her family built her a ramp.
- Mrs. Crab: Peg's physical therapist at University Hospital, whom Peg doesn't like. Gives her Torture Time.
- Art: Peg's older, good looking brother, whom Dorothy adores.
- Dr. Bevis: Peg's doctor at University Hospital, to whom she has a crush on and she promises to walk for one day.
- Miss. Ballard: Peg's physical therapist at Sheltering Arms that she's very fond of.
- Beth and Bob: Peg's parents who bring treats for Peg and the girls every Sunday.
Read more about this topic: Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)