Ellen Outside the Lines

Accepting the unpredictability of life is something that Ellen finds greatly challenging, but she gradually learns to embrace this mindset during the Barcelona trip. In the opening scene of the novel, her panic over Laurel’s failure to call her sets a baseline from which Ellen grows as the story progresses. In this moment, she panics over Laurel’s silence, and her doubts about her friendship with Laurel are strengthened when she worries that she is being completely abandoned. Ellen’s life is thrown off-course by the fact that Laurel ended up spending more time with her other friends and forgot to call Ellen. Thus, it is clear that many of Ellen’s difficulties come from the discrepancy between her expectations and her real-life experiences. When she begins the Barcelona trip, however, she must soon come to terms with the fact that no matter how much she tries to predict her future by researching Barcelona and the scavenger hunt, there is no way to predict what will happen. It is barely the first day when Ellen realizes that nothing about the trip will be like she imagined. The novel’s title, Ellen Outside the Lines, therefore emphasizes Ellen’s journey of learning to accept the surprises and unexpected twists that life inevitably offers.