Five words, and only one of the five is good news. Deployed means sent away on military duty, and Ally’s father is deployed overseas, which is the pressure sitting under everything else in this part. A setback is a problem that slows progress, and the substitute’s words are a painful one. To discourage is to take away someone’s confidence, which is exactly what the mockery is designed to do. To persevere is to keep going despite hardship, and Ally chooses to. Logic is careful, step-by-step reasoning, and she solves the puzzle with nothing else at all. Notice which two words end the list. Hunt spends three words knocking Ally down, then gives her the two she gets up with — one of which nobody at that school ever thought to measure.

Part 5 raises a specific threat, answers it through character action, and leaves an altered aftermath. Ally’s father is a soldier deployed far from home, and during a video call she proudly shares how she is starting to learn to read. The same struggle runs in the family: her brother Travis, who left school early, is quietly desperate because his boss wants him to read repair manuals for his job, and he cannot — a painful sign that Travis may share Ally’s undiagnosed dyslexia. Working with Ally, Mr. Daniels gives her an exercise that leaves her with a small slip of paper reading, in effect, ‘anything is possible,’ and she keeps it in her pocket like a talisman. But the road is not smooth. That progression explains how “Falling Down and Getting Up” produces lasting consequence.

Part 5 layers motif, parallel, and setback so that an ordinary detail carries later significance. Watch the little slip of paper Ally carries in her pocket, its message that anything is possible. It is a motif — a small image the book returns to again and again — and it works like a heartbeat under the story. Every time Ally’s courage falters, the paper is there, a physical reminder in her own hand that the impossible thing (reading) might be possible after all. Hunt ties it back to the ‘Sketchbook of Impossible Things’ from Part 1: what once meant fantasy (flying wheelchairs) is turning into belief (I could learn to read). Keep an eye on this phrase; by the last page it will have traveled from a teacher’s exercise, to Ally’s pocket, to Ally’s own true opinion of herself — and finally to something she can offer someone else. That authorial design makes “‘Anything Is Possible’” a lesson in deliberate irony.

As Ally begins to believe in herself, it helps to know that some of history’s most brilliant people learned differently, and many are believed to have had dyslexia or similar differences. The inventor Thomas Edison was called ‘addled’ and pulled from school by a teacher who thought him hopeless; he went on to hold over a thousand patents. Albert Einstein was a late talker who struggled in the rote-memory schooling of his day, yet reimagined the universe. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in mirror-image and left work unfinished, but few minds have ranged so widely. In our own time, dyslexic thinkers have become award-winning film directors, entrepreneurs, architects, and scientists. One caution belongs with that list. None of these people succeeded because of dyslexia, and reading did not stop being hard for them — the point is narrower and truer: a brain that struggles with print is not a brain that struggles with thinking.

Visual AidA page written the wrong way round