Summerland

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2002

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 6-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-15

Part 2, Chapter 16-Part 3, Chapter 20

Part 3, Chapter 21-Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 2, Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Second Base”

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Thor’s Crossing”

To make the jump to the Summerlands, Thor pictures his home team’s field on a sunny spring day when the sky is clear and the breeze clean. Despite this, Thor’s inexperience gets them stuck in the nothingness between worlds, and they start to lose altitude over “[t]he mightiest Nothing there is” (155). With help from Jennifer T., Thor gets back on track, and they break through into the green of the Summerlands. Cinquefoil recognizes the area and plots a course toward where the four worlds meet at the well. Before they can get far, however, a giant hand plucks them out of the sky.

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Eighteenth Giant Brother”

The hand belongs to a giant, who Cinquefoil recognizes as one of the 18 brothers of the Summerlands. Cinquefoil tries to convince the giant to let them go, but the giant doesn’t care about their mission and decides to eat them instead. From reading about mythology, Ethan remembers that giants are gamblers, and he offers a wager: If Ethan can catch three of the giant’s fastballs, the giant will let them go. Ethan doesn’t know how he’ll do that, since he just started catching, and Cinquefoil suggests “why don’t ya look in yer book?” (169).

Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Taffy”

The giant’s lodge is enormous, smelly, and cold. Ethan flips through the book, finding a section about eldritch worlds, which Taffy, the giant’s pet sasquatch, informs them is the term for “a world where the Rule of Enchantment remains in force” (174). The giant captured the sasquatch many years ago, and she has been his prisoner ever since.

Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “A Game of Catch”

As Ethan steps onto the giant’s baseball field, he grows to the giant’s size in accordance with eldritch rules. Ethan catches the first ball, though doing so feels like having his entire body broken, cooked, and frozen at once. He also catches the second ball, which feels even worse, “as if he were a bell that had just been struck, and his poor left arm was the clapper” (184). Ethan doesn’t think he can survive a third catch and desperately searches the book for anything useful. He finds a page with gestures to call the pitch, meaning to tell the pitcher how to throw. Ethan calls for a slower ball, and though the giant is annoyed, he follows the call because he can’t ignore the rules of the game. Ethan catches it easily, winning the wager.

Enraged at the loss, the giant throws an enormous tantrum that shakes the ground. During this, Jennifer T. goes to free Taffy, but the cage’s thick bars and giant keyhole thwart her efforts. In the book her uncle gave her, she finds information on how locks work, and she climbs into the keyhole to move the pins and unlock the door. Taffy hugs Jennifer T. in thanks, depriving her of air. When Jennifer T. wakes, she’s in the car, and the giant is about to throw them across a divide to the next stop on their journey.

Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Mr. Feld in the Winterlands”

While Ethan and his friends continue their journey, Ethan’s dad is jostled along on his way to the well, and he doesn’t believe anything Padfoot says about the Tree of Worlds, Coyote, or the mission to destroy stories and the universe. To convince him, Padfoot reveals his true form: a furry beast with a sharp-toothed grin. When Ethan’s dad still doesn’t believe, Padfoot takes him outside, where werewolves pull sleighs alongside the giant machine in which Ethan’s dad rides. The caravan stops at a crossroads, and Padfoot joins the other beings, leaving Ethan’s dad to converse with a raven that reveals itself as Coyote.

In a flash, the winter landscape is gone, and Ethan’s dad is in a cozy room with a fire and coffee. Coyote tells Ethan’s dad that he wants the materials used to build the airship to poison the well that feeds the Tree of Worlds in order to destroy creation. If Ethan’s dad helps, he’ll reunite with Ethan before the world ends, and if not, he’ll never see his son again. Ethan’s father agrees, saying he has no choice, to which Coyote replies, “[Y]ou always have a choice, […] that’s another little fun feature of life you can put down to me, if you like” (223).

Part 2, Chapters 6-10 Analysis

In Part 2, Ethan and his companions become a team through situations like their travel in Chapter 6. Thor has never used his shadowtail abilities to travel between worlds before, so he struggles to learn how. The support he receives from Ethan and Jennifer T. when the group gets stuck within the branches of the tree helps Thor gain the confidence he needs to both travel through the tree and begin his journey of self-discovery. In addition, these chapters involve trials that establish the rules of Chabon’s world. The faerie realm’s deep integration with the game of baseball means that the kids can call on their knowledge of the game to assist them through the challenges they face. Chapters 7 and 9 reveal this as Ethan consults his book for answers about being a catcher and realizes that he can control the pitch. He uses this knowledge to force the giant into a slower pitch so that he can catch the third ball despite his depleted strength. Ethan’s successful navigation of this challenge foreshadows his use of wit and baseball knowledge to navigate through the Summerlands. In addition, Ethan’s navigating this challenge introduces a third major theme, The Role of Competition, showing how winning or losing is sometimes a matter of thinking through a problem, not just raw skill or the lack of it.

Taffy’s rescue is a reminder that Ethan’s group is the “good guys,” because despite the urgency of their task, his group helps those in need. The rescue also shows Jennifer T. coming into her own as a member of the team and as a caring person who thinks strategically. Like Ethan, she consults her guidebook, but instead of baseball, Jennifer T. uses practical knowledge to solve problems, showing how the worlds, though different, have similarities. Keys and locks work the same way in the Summerlands as they do in the Middling, which allows Jennifer T. to figure out how to apply this information on a giant scale. As a sasquatch, Taffy is a representation of myth, and Chabon stays true to the legends by giving Taffy an apelike appearance and a gentle personality. The giant that the group faces is likewise drawn from myth. Across belief systems, giants are known for being large, strong, and not highly intelligent, elements that Chabon incorporates. Ethan’s understanding of myth allows him to pinpoint the giant’s weakness—gambling—and use this to his advantage, again showing how his status as a hero doesn’t rely solely on his baseball abilities. The eldritch rules that the novel introduces here are not only important to the wager Ethan makes with the giant but are also significant throughout the Summerlands because the faerie tribes are bound to respect these rules. By contrast, Coyote breaks or bends them as he sees fit, which makes the trickster a more powerful threat than the others that Ethan’s group encounters.

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Chapter 10 offers a glimpse at the Winterlands (which, like Summerlands, are based on a season) and introduces Coyote’s caravan of demon-like faeries and the abandon with which such creatures interact with their surroundings. These creatures are drawn to Coyote because he’s a force of chaos, and they wish to be free from the constraints of existence and the restrictions that its rules place on them. As an engineer, Ethan’s dad struggles to accept what he sees because his analytical mind seeks to process the information within the confines of the world he knows. When he can’t, however, he admits that existence encompasses more than he understands, helping thematically develop The Two Sides to Every Story and revealing that stringent adherence to rules can be both a benefit and drawback. The conversation between Ethan’s dad and Coyote symbolizes the trickery Coyote is renowned for. By taking the discussion to a warm room with comforts that Ethan’s dad is accustomed to, Coyote disarms the man and makes him more pliable so that he’ll more readily agree to what Coyote asks of him. Coyote’s promise for Ethan’s dad to see his son before the world ends foreshadows how this promise isn’t fulfilled as it’s stated. When Coyote does reunite the Felds, Ethan’s dad has lost himself and thus is unaware of Ethan’s presence. However, he technically does see Ethan, meaning that the bargain is fulfilled in the most basic sense of how Coyote proposed it. Coyote’s comment about always having a choice is true, even if Ethan’s dad doesn’t see it that way: While Ethan’s dad refuses to accept the consequences of not helping Coyote, that doesn’t mean he has no choice. This chapter illustrates how Coyote himself symbolizes the role that competition plays and thematically represents The Power of Change.