The View from Saturday Study Guide

• Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski teaches at Epiphany Middle School. She feels that sixth-grade students have descended from "Now what?" to "So what?" during the years she has been away. Once shaken by her injury (car crash) and left paraplegic, she has suffered also from how students receive her. The four Souls respect her and help restore her confidence as a teacher. Although they are not the first four students she initially considered, Mrs. Olinski ultimately selects the Souls as the Academic Bowl team representing her class. For a long while she is not certain why she picked them, but with help from her friend Mr. Singh, she finally sees why, as explained in a long and confusing anecdote.
• Noah Gershom has brown hair and wears glasses. His mother is a doctor and his father is a dentist who employs Nadia's mom. In Noah's story, he visits his grandparents who reside in a retirement home in Florida, where he unexpectedly has an opportunity to learn calligraphy and accidentally becomes the best man at the wedding of Izzy Diamondstein (Nadia's grandfather) and Margaret Draper (Ethan's grandmother) when Izzy's son sprains his ankle. Noah is the first to be chosen by Mrs. Olinski to become part of the quiz team because he is intelligent, observant, quick and articulate, always able to provide an answer, and is a willing leader. As Noah learns, he cannot always be the hero, and that a team only wins the Academic Bowl by working together.
• Nadia Diamondstein is a beautiful plump girl with curly red hair, which notably forms a halo in the sunlight. She recently moved to New York from Florida with her mother, who works as a dental hygienist for Noah's father. Her father is an accountant in Florida, where grandfather Izzy Diamondstein recently married Ethan's grandmother Margaret Draper, formerly a principal and Mrs. Olinski's best friend. In the school play, Nadia's dog Ginger plays Little Orphan Annie's dog Sandy. She has a fondness for sea turtles.
• Ethan Potter is a medium-sized boy with short, blond hair. He lives on a farm, and his family is one of the oldest in Epiphany. His grandmother, Margaret Draper, a teacher who retired to Florida, recently married Nadia's grandfather Izzy Diamondstein. Aware that he tends to disappoint his teachers, who compare and expect him to excel academically and athletically like his older brother, Lucas, Ethan is a quiet and nervous individual until he becomes a part of the Souls. He loves theater, staging included, and has a secret passion for halos. His family's goal for him is to be a farmer while Lucas goes all around the world.
• Julian Singh is an Indian boy with black hair and a British accent that he acquired as a boarding school student in England. His mother was a chanteuse, or singer, on a cruise ship who died young. His father is a cook and now an innkeeper at a farm in Epiphany that he has made into a bed and breakfast inn. There Julian has been "facilitator" of the four Souls, as host of 4:00 pm tea every Saturday.: Julian was teased and bullied by other students this year, as a new boy from another culture. That was a learning experience, especially for Ethan. Julian is the last chosen for the quiz team, the missing piece from Mrs. Olinski's perspective. Julian makes the very best of things. When a bully wrote something that was not school appropriate on his backpack, he wrote: I AM A pASSenger on spaceship earth. When kids try to trip him, he says "excuse me" or "I beg your pardon".

Konigsburg tells Scholastic Teachers regarding all of her books that "the characters begin their lives as people that I may know, but they end up their lives as characters!" She considers the friendship of the four Souls unusual but not unreal. She believes that she has something in common with them: "There are parts in each of them that I relate to. Noah's resistance to authority, for example. Ethan's challenge for having a high-achieving sibling. Nadia's sense of having been abandoned. And I hope, Julian's kindness and outsiderness. Julian was the most outside of all of those children." There is a metaphor in every symbol.