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"A skeleton in a Dior dress", a friend once referred to some of my critical work. I have to take that as a complement, since I believe that the arguments did not suffer for the elegance of their presentation. (or at least I hope not) The unique media of Hypertext, require that the critic adapt, both in his reading and in the media of his response, to the uniqueness of the tools that produced the work he is examining. To give a short answer to Landow's opening question in his book Hypertext/Theory : "What's a critic to do?" : Roll with it!
Works done in "StorySpace" present some unique challenges; especially when the critic is without the full version of the software (although that posession presents another set of problems). The tools I used for this piece I believe are appropriate to Ms. Jackson's opus, and I hope they will allow this reading to proceed with a fair amount of smoothness. Please note, that what I am presenting is only one reading of this particular hyperbook, and because it is a hyperbook, only one path - and that fairly linear - through the text of this Patchwork Girl.