Telling Tells

Tells, unconscious movements that telegraph a person’s emotions, are beloved by novelists and gamblers. A character may rub his neck when he lies. Another character might pick at her split ends when she’s bored. Eyebrows frequently rise. Jaws are forever dropping. But sometimes a character has such a unique and memorable tell that it jumps off the page.

In The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, by Mackenzi Lee, the protagonist, Felicity Montague, has arrived unannounced at the wedding of her estranged childhood friend, Johanna. The bride-to-be has been chatting happily about her fiancé, a man Felicity has long idolized. Then Lee adds this description: “But then Johana pulls in her cheeks too hard and bites down upon them so that she looks like a fish. It’s a nervous habit from childhood, one she used to do so often in the presence of her father that the insides of her cheeks would bleed” (page 141). The simple gesture shows us that Johanna’s relationship with her father was fraught and her upcoming nuptials are not the happy event everyone is pretending. We also learn that Felicity still empathizes with her friend. In forty-eight words, we get character elucidation, backstory and foreshadowing. Wow.

    Katherine Tegen Books, 2018