The most enduring and fragile aspect of one's childhood remains naive innocence. In Ferris Beach by Jill McCorckle, Katie Burns grows up over the course of the novel, losing her innocence in the process. Difficulties, tragedies and losses radically change a person's perception of the world around him. Katie, like almost all children, sees the world through naive and inexperienced eyes as a child, and her perception of the world is filtered through her imagination and ideas about life. As the child grows up, he faces turning points in his life, moments in which a merciless reality deprives him of his innocence. Through a series of significant emotional events, Katie loses her innocence, only to be replaced by a harsher, more flawed, and tragic view of the world. One of the novel's early plot lines revolves around the emergence of Angela Burns, shrouded in mystery. , Katie's cousin. Angela Burns becomes Katie's model of perfection from an early age in her life: "It was that day that I attached to Angela everything beautiful and lively and good" (5). Katie's naivety allows her to believe that a person can be perfect, and Katie aspires to one day become Angela. Over the course of the novel, however, Angela's image of perfection slowly begins to crumble, and when Katie finally visits Angela's house, reality shatters the perfect image. When Katie enters Angela's apartment she sees "dishes in the sink, sparse furniture with worn sand-colored upholstery, a floor-to-ceiling lamp with dimmable lights like some kind of insect; a square lime-green shag rug covered the center of the floor." " (267). Such a squalid and repulsive apartment destroys Katie's vision of Angela's perfect life. This enlightening experience has returned... to the center of the card... to better deal with her life as a child. Now, Angela she embarrasses and shames Katie for her innocent childhood dreams. Childhood fantasies often turn out to be just that, fantasies. Katie learns this lesson in a painful way, through the humiliation Angela imposes on her at a fragile time in her life. Katie's childhood dream becomes a source of pain after Angela mocks her. In the journey from child to adult, many painful barriers must be overcome. In Katie's case, her experiences with death, love and... her imagination all end in hard-learned lessons; lessons that take her out of innocence and into experience, an experience that seems crueler and harsher than the image of the world she had as a child. Yet, all the paths of life remain full of difficulties, lessons and tragedies, and perhaps the sooner we live to learn from them, the better..