After an hour, however, the weather begins to change a girl catches a raindrop on her palm and begins crying, and the children hurry back inside as the storms once again approach.

The sun’s emergence has an immediate effect on the children: They joyfully shed their coats as they play and bask in the sunlight. The teacher then returns and takes the class outside, where the rain is finally stopping. Whipped into a frenzy, the children push Margot into a closet and lock her inside as she cries, pleads, and beats on the door to be let out. On this particular day, the children vent their nervous excitement on Margot a boy named William taunts her, asking what she’s waiting for and claiming that the scientists’ forecast is “all a joke” (Paragraph 40). Margot’s unhappiness combined with her classmates’ jealousy make her the target of bullying. Only when they sang about the sun and summer did her lips move, as she watched the drenched windows” (Paragraph 28). She both remembers and desperately misses the sun and has shown little interest in interacting with her classmates: “When the class sang songs about life and happiness and games, her lips barely moved. The one exception is a girl named Margot, who moved to Venus with her parents at age four and whose parents are considering moving back there soon, although it will be expensive to do so. In the days leading up to this event, the children have learned about the sun in school, but because most of them were born on Venus, they have no actual memories of sunlight. Set on a recently colonized Venus, the story begins with a crowd of nine-year-olds peering out their classroom window to see whether the rain is stopping on Venus, the sun only appears for one hour in between seven-year intervals of rain.

All summer in a day text