The New Couple in 5B

Throughout The New Couple in 5B, protagonist Rosie Lowan struggles to reconcile her rationalist worldview with the belief in magic and the supernatural that was ingrained in her at a young age by her family. At the beginning of the novel, she rejects her con artist father’s belief in magic and the supernatural, seeing it as part of a strategy of deception he used to exploit her and others. By the end of the novel, however, she has accepted that not everything she experiences can be explained by science. Rosie describes her mother and father as “tricksters, frauds, con artists, preying on the most vulnerable” in their small town in the Ozarks by pretending to be able to heal illnesses and tell fortunes (98). Rosie’s parents raised her and her sister Sarah to believe that they also had magic powers. Rosie explains that “my father called me a seer,” someone who “glimpses into the future, who receives messages or visions” (111). Similarly, her sister Sarah “was what my father called a dreamer, the visions she had while she slept very often coming to pass” (67). The repeated use of the phrase “my father called” in these passages suggests that, at this stage in the