98 pages • 3 hours read
Eden RobinsonSon of a Trickster
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 29-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary: “Firefly”
Mrs. Jaks’ brothers arrive with a moose to butcher, and Jared spends the day helping them. Sarah is certain that her family members do not like her because she is “too white,” “not white enough,” or “too weird” (208), but her great-uncles and aunts treat her with affection. Later that night Sarah wakes up Jared at home to take mushrooms and have sex. While she is high, she sees a swarm of fireflies above Jared’s head that sing to her. She sees them travel through time and space and tells Jared that he is hers. She covers his eyes with her hands to share her visions with him, and when she takes her hands away, he sees the fireflies in a foreign, barren landscape. He sees a caveman-like person watching them, and Jared tries to wake himself up from what he thinks is a dream. When the swarm of fireflies touches Sarah’s hand, she starts to disappear. Distraught, especially because a huge group of cavemen have started grunting at them, Jared wills himself awake.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Welcome to the Jungle”
With Sarah gone, Jared tries to convince himself he is sane. He tries to watch TV, but the “ape man” reappears through the floor of the living room. His inner voice tells him: “You have to calm down [...] you’re being too loud. Being this loud is dangerous when you don’t know what you’re doing” (216). Jared convinces himself he is having a “shroom flashback,” a result of kissing Sarah last night, but a group of ape men surround him until something bangs loudly on the window and frightens them off.
In the middle of the night, a voice wakes him up telling him his mother is hurt. The ape men return, and suddenly Baby appears outside his window, even though he knows she is dead. In the morning he goes outside and finds that “Baby’s paw prints were obscured by smaller, clawed paw prints” (219). He checks on his mom and has to remind her what day and month it is. The ape men join them in the room, but Jared does not engage with them. Maggie notices that Jared is carrying a gun in his belt and shows him how to use a holster and draw from it quickly, saying: “Don’t hesitate [...] If it’s them or you, go with you” (220).
Chapter 31 Summary: “The Universe is a Lonely Hunter”
The unknown narrator explains that “our universe is a membrane” and that “we don’t go through the looking glass,” “we are the looking glass” (221). They discuss the existence of multiple dimensions, the possibility of shifting out of them, and the fact that Tricksters can transcend “stubbornly separate” universes (222).
Chapter 32 Summary: “Dylan Quits Hockey”
At lunch, Dylan tells Jared how disappointed his parents are that he quit hockey. Jared catches himself talking to the ape men, who are now constantly present, and “[worries] that he’d wrecked his brains for good” (226). When he gets home from school, Jared notices that his mom has hung cedar in his room. Now that his mom is recovering, he reconsiders spending the summer with Nana Sophia. The secret of his plans still brings him anxiety, and he wonders if the ape men are “just a reflection of what he was feeling” (226).
After dinner, Jared mentions David to his mom, and she asks if he blames her for the abuse. Jared realizes that David must have been abusing his mom regularly and that “she’d put up with it, until that night” (228). He thanks her for saving him, and she reminds him that she “[deals] with [her] messes” (228).
Chapters 29-32 Analysis
Jared sees his first spirits, just as Jwa’sins foreshadowed. The ape men’s arrival is brought on by Sarah’s mushroom trip, during which her fireflies appear for the first time, too. They embody the magic Sarah possesses, but she has repressed it since her mother sent her to therapy as a child. The magic has been dormant inside of her, as the unknown narrator explained in Chapter 20, and Jared’s presence in her life has encouraged it to reemerge. The visions they share that night are real, a result of their shared supernatural powers, but neither one of them is mentally stable nor sober enough to distinguish their magical reality from a hallucinogen-induced fantasy.
Jared’s concern for his sanity nears its peak now that the ape men spirits are always present; his incessant worry is characterized by the way he constantly reminds himself that everything he is seeing is “in his head” (215). To rationalize his visions, he tells himself that the ape men are just representations of his feelings. The magical elements of the novel become more sinister as the malicious spirits begin to pursue Jared. Jared does not recognize the significance of the paw prints outside his door, but he instinctively knows that something is particularly off if he is suddenly seeing Baby now. The unknown narrator does not explicitly address the malevolent spirits that have targeted Jared but explains that Tricksters are the only beings that can travel between various universes, suggesting that Jared might be a Trickster after all.
