“Once again Armpit was holding a shovel, only now he was getting paid for it, seven dollars and sixty-five cents an hour.”

This is the first sentence of the book, and it speaks to Louis Sachar’s previous novel Holes (1998) in which Armpit spent 14 months digging holes at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention center. The quote is important because it ties Armpit’s past to his present, in which he is digging holes for a living, turning his life around.

“She said his life would be like walking upstream in a rushing river. The secret was to take small steps and just keep moving forward. If he tried to take too big a step, the current would knock him off his feet and carry him back downstream.”

After Armpit’s release from Camp Green Lake, his counselor at the halfway house uses the metaphor of the rushing river as she warned Armpit that his life would be hard, but not to give up. Armpit takes her advice to take “small steps” and creates a set of achievable goals, establishing the novel’s theme of Moving on From the Past by Taking Small Steps. Later in the story, when Armpit gets knocked back, he thinks about her again, realizing he took “too big a step.”

“I’m gonna take you someplace you never been before, and you’ll never be the same again!”

This quote is the chorus to one of Kaira’s most popular songs. Armpit hears it before he meets Kaira, and it foreshadows both the good and the bad events that happen as their story unfolds. This song also becomes one of Armpit and Ginny’s favorites, and for them, these lyrics sum up the life-changing experience of the concert.