In Hegi’s Floating In My Mother’s Palm, the author gives us the experience of journeying with Hanna as she discovers her hometown from the point of view of Trudi Montag, a female dwarf who runs the local pay-library. From Trudi’s point of view there are few illusions or secrets left about the people of Burgdorf. Trudi knows everything about everyone, specially the things most people would like to keep hidden. Throughout the story, Trudi’s reactions and well of information knit the story together. Often her revelations have a major impact on Hanna or others, like when Rolf discovers he is the illegitimate son of an American soldier. Yet, Trudi’s revelations not only act as a framing device throughout Hanna’s journey, they also help her on a parallel journey she is undertaking. Hanna is an adolescent and experiences her first kiss and her first awakenings of adulthood in the story. Her mother’s death and other experiences in the novel allow her to become herself in ways she never knew existed, “But of course it didn’t work that way, and it only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life-not the life of a stranger as I had imagined-but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again” (Hegi 187).
Trudi Montag is a dwarf who inherited the local pay-library in her forties when her father died. She is the town crier. Good news or bad, Trudi knows it. Whether it is good new or bad, she not only knows it but she spreads the news throughout the town. If Trudi knows your darkest secret, then you can be sure everyone else in Burgdorf knows it. As Rolf says when he finds out from Hanna that Trudi is the one who told her about his dad, “He groaned. ‘That means everyone knows’” (Hegi 171).
To the townsfolk, Trudi is a thorn in the side because she knows everything, some things even before they happen. She will not let t...