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<title> David Maloufs' Remembering Babylon Janet McIvor </title>
Janet McIvor is the daughter of Jock and Ellen McIvor. She has a little sister named Meg and a cousin named Lachlan Beattie. Janet lives in a small village in Queensland, Australia. Her parents are from Scotland, and Janet is dreaming about visiting Scotland. She wants to see a bigger world than the one she lives in. 

When we first meet Janet McIvor she appears to be a little girl playing with her little sister and cousin. They are playing imaginary games. Still a child she is starting to become an adult. She is jealous of her cousin, who as a boy starts to be accepted as a man, even though she is older than he is. She wants recognition and approval from the adults. She is starting to show that she can take responsibility, she is growing up. By these actions and continuing reading you get the feeling that Janet is in the early teens, or younger as this is a text from the mid-nineteenth-century. She is still a child but you get the feeling that she will enter the adult world. (Page 6ff and 35ff).

	Janet is presented as an observant and intelligent young girl. Even though she might not know what is happening, she knows something is. She knows things about both herself and of others that is a mystery to many people in the world. She can read emotions in people just by looking at them and hear them talk. She recognizes thing about herself the way they are. She can then put these things aside knowing what they are and that she can use them later. I would say that she has a very big Emotional Intelligence, which she doesn't use to the fullest. Her world is different, clearer than others are because of this ability. (Page 89-90 and 141ff).

	At one point in the book the Author tells us that Janet has come to a turning point. She has now entered the world of the adults. And you also get the felling that Janet is two-three years older when you read. Her thoughts and actions are the ones of an older person. There is not much left of that little girl we meet in the beginning. She knows. When Janet is tending the bees together with Mrs. Hutchence she comes to the insight that this is what she wants to do in her life. Being around the bees helps her think and relax and makes her feel relieved. Her world has been made bigger. She has found her reason for living. She thinks that the time is slowing down to a comprehensible state when working with the bees. She perceives the world in a different way, a way that she can understand. After an overwhelming confrontation with the bees she grows even more. She believes in herself. She comes to an insight about herself; the power of her beliefs can change her world. (Page 138ff. p.143)
	
	At the end of the book we are introduced to Janet and Lachlan again after fifty years. We see how it has gone for them. Janet is in a monastery still tending her beloved bees. When Lachlan visits we get to know that Janet always have had strong feelings for him. Some of her thoughts earlier in the book become understandable, why she was jealous of him and how she was against him. She is an old woman but still have the power of reading peoples emotions. (Page 182ff)

	Janets personality and characteristic comes almost exclusively from her thinking and acting. We get to see the world through her point of view at times in the text. These instances give the reader some understanding into Janet. Sometime the Author put in information about Janet also. That and all small nuances in the text make you see how Janet grows. That time might flow fast at some point even though it is almost hidden, and you get to know it after the fact. But you always know when the characters in the book are growing. You feel how Janet matures.
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