One of the novel’s central ideas is that everyone has a “savvy,” a special, unique power.While the Beaumonts may appear abnormal and different, their savvies are just more noticeable than most—any difference between the Beaumonts and other people is a difference of degree, not of essence.Mibs’s mother always tells her that the Beaumonts are just like other people: “we get born, and sometime later we die.”In between, the Beaumonts are “happy” and “sad,” feel “love and “fear,” “eat” and “sleep” and “hurt,” just “like everyone else.”And just like the Beaumonts, other people have powers that can sometimes be miraculous.Samson, Mibs’s brother who is too young to have developed a savvy, has the ability to comfort a person simply through his touch.Mibs thinks this ability might be “an ordinary sort of human magic,” the magic created when one person cares sincerely for another.Later, when Lill comes along and enchants them all—especially Lester—with her warm, welcoming manner, Mibs thinks she might be “an angel sent to look after us.”Of course, Lill is not really an angel—but her ability to transform Lester with her love certainly seems miraculous.Even Lester has his own savvy, managing to sweep Lill off her feet first by rescuing her after her car breaks down, and then by defending her from her cruel boss.As Mibs says, Lester might not look like a hero, but “you never can tell...who might have a piece of Prince Charming deep down inside.”

The greatest proof that “savvies” are universal and very human occurs near the novel’s conclusion.When Mibs finally reaches her father, she discovers she can use neither the savvy she hoped she possessed—the ability to wake things up—nor the supernatural savvy she does possess—the ability to hear thoughts.Unable to hear her father's thoughts, Mibs has to rely on her ordinary, human power to connect with her father and express her love for him.Furthermore, she forces her father to recognize his own savvy, the fact that he never gives up.Thus, with the combination of two very human savvies, Mibs’s deep love for her father and her father's will to live, Poppa Beaumont manages to overcome his injury.

Savvy takes place on the days surrounding Mibs’s thirteenth birthday, and Mibs’s struggle to transition from childhood to womanhood is a major focus of the novel.In a sense, the Beaumonts’ savvies are simply metaphors for growing up, for the powerful, terrifying, but also wonderful changes that occur during the teenage years.For Mibs, her thirteenth birthday is complicated by her father's accident, as Mibs is forced to face all at once one of the most difficult aspects of growing up: the realization that one’s parents are not invulnerable, that one cannot remain a child dependent on parents to fix everything, that sometimes the child has to grow up and take care of the parent.Mibs illustrates her understanding of this reversal at the end of the novel, when she begins to tell her father, “It’s your little—,“ but stops, realizing that she is not his “little girl” anymore.

In addition, Mibs deals with romantic feelings for the first time, as Will accompanies her on her trip and gives her her first kiss.Mibs is attracted to Will, but at the same time, she is scared by all the changes their kiss implies.Eventually, Mibs does the mature thing and tells Will she likes him, but she is not quite ready for a relationship yet. Because Will and Mibs remain friends after her...

Mibs’s savvy, her ability to hear others’ thoughts, allows her to realize how the voices and opinions of different people can control an individual’s perceptions and behavior.Specifically, Mibs notices that Lester’s thoughts consist of the voices of two women in his life, his mother and girlfriend, who constantly criticize and belittle him.Lester has allowed these women’s opinions to drown out his own voice completely, so that he actually believes their view of him and lets it influence his actions.Thinking about Lester, Mibs realizes that everyone has many different voices running through their head.Mibs herself has her parents’ positive voices, telling her right from wrong, as well as the negative voices of two bullies at school, Ashley and Emma, who constantly taunt Mibs and call her a freak.After seeing what the negative voices have done to Lester, Mibs vows that she will never let other people’s opinions “have that kind of power over me.”And Mibs is successful: by the end of the novel, she knows which voices to pay attention to and which ones to ignore.As she tells the reader, “this newfound strength must have shown like a mark on my skin, for the next time I ran into Ashley and Emma, those girls kept their mouths shut.”