The Stillwater Girls

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, child death, and child abuse.

For most of their lives, Wren, Sage, and Evie have been isolated in physical space—Maggie’s remote cabin—while for the past nine years of her life, Nic has been isolated in psychological space, haunted by fragments of memories from events she can’t quite remember. The Stillwater Girls explores the effects of prolonged isolation the characters’ mental, emotional, and physical health. In the secluded environment of the homestead, the Sharp sisters are unable to access outside resources that would balance their perspectives, help them grow, and broaden their understanding of their own identities. When Evie is rescued from Davis’s home, Wren notes that, because the child spent her whole life in the “prison” of the homestead, “keeping her in a locked room probably wasn’t all that traumatic for her” (233). Evie’s circumstances—first with Maggie and then with Davis—have prevented her from understanding herself as a person with a right to freedom of movement and freedom of choice. Sage, babied by Maggie and Wren on the homestead, has no outside perspective encouraging her to mature and remains unnaturally childlike at 18 years old.