The Darkest Minds

Ruby Daly is the protagonist of The Darkest Minds, and the story is told from her first-person point-of-view. For most of the novel, Ruby is 16 years old. She is described by several characters as “pretty” (111). Although her early childhood is spent in a typical family in Salem, Virginia—her father a police officer and her mother a teacher—her life changes when she is almost 10 years old and Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration (IAAN) kills most of the other children in the country. At that time, she developed special Psi abilities and enters Thurmond, a brutal camp for Psi children, where she spent almost half her life. Being at the camp causes Ruby to become mistrusting and guarded in respect to others, but it also makes her resourceful.

Like the society she lives in, Ruby is afraid of her own power. For most of the novel, she doesn’t have effective control over her abilities, and she doesn’t intentionally call upon them or practice using them. Ruby is haunted by the experience of having accidentally erased herself from her parents’ and her best friend’s memories. Being an Orange is, for her, always linked with guilt and shame; she thinks of it as being a monster.