Breakout

Nora Tucker is a seventh grader and lifelong resident of Wolf Creek. She is white like most of the town’s other residents and never questions her place in the community. As the person gathering the multi-media documents that compose the narrative, Nora is positioned as the primary perspective of the novel and thus its protagonist. Her Post-It notes label and introduce each document, and she is a generally reliable narrator: An aspiring journalist, Nora prioritizes gathering facts, fairness, and finding the truth, though she sometimes “forgets she’s talking to real people with feelings” (196), according to Lizzie. As the daughter of the Wolf Creek Correctional Facility superintendent, Nora is fascinated by prisoner escapes and wants to write a book about the famous escape from Alcatraz in 1963. Her fascination with the escape and acknowledgement that all the differing perspectives about it make finding the truth difficult foreshadow the novel’s inciting incident as well as many of its themes.

Through her letters, Nora both introduces and concludes the moral arc of the story. Her experiences attempting to report on the prison break demonstrate The Media’s Role in Shaping Perception, as she and her friends discover that the news is not always reported reliably, and her own comments are taken out of