50 pages • 1 hour read
Kate QuinnThe Huntress
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue
The first part of the Prologue is told in third person from the perspective of the Huntress in the Fall of 1945. In Altaussee, Austria, the Huntress worries that she may face trial at the end of the Second World War, like the Nazis with whom she is involved. She vows to escape before she is caught.
The second part of the prologue is a meditation by the British journalist Ian Graham in April 1946 on the “Huntress,” the mistress of a Nazi SS officer in Poland who murdered Jews, Allied soldiers, and children like it was a sport. Ian wonders whether the “small fish” (4) like her will escape the Nuremberg trials for Nazi war criminals.
Chapter 1 Summary
In 1946, Jordan McBride is a 17-year-old Bostonian who lives with her widowed father, an antiques dealer named Daniel. Jordan wants to go to college and study photography, but her father prefers that she marry her high-school boyfriend, Garrett Byrne. Meanwhile, Daniel is dating a quiet Austrian widow named Anneliese Weber who has a four-year-old daughter named Ruth.
At dinner, Jordan takes a picture of Anneliese. When she develops it in her darkroom, she notices the “unsettling” and “cruel” (17) half-smile on the woman’s face. The expression is incongruous with Anneliese’s otherwise gentle demeanor, and Jordan recollects she took the snapshot while Anneliese and Daniel discussed how much they enjoyed hunting.
Chapter 2 Summary
In Cologne, Germany in 1950, Ian recruits his American partner Tony in an effort to find the Huntress. They comb through Altaussee, her last known whereabouts, looking for leads. Tony contacts Nina, a Soviet woman whom Ian met in Poznań, Poland in 1945 after she saw the Huntress. Ian surprises Tony by introducing Nina as his wife.
Chapter 3 Summary
In prewar Siberia in the Soviet Union, Nina Markova grows up in a dysfunctional family headed by her alcoholic father, Boris. When her father calls her a rusalka, a malevolent water spirit, and tries to drown her in freezing-cold Lake Baikal, Nina vows to devote herself to whatever “is the opposite of drowning” (40).
Chapter 4 Summary
It is April 1946, and although Jordan loves her boyfriend Garrett, she does not want to marry him straight out of high school. Instead, she would rather go to college, study photography, and travel to Europe.
When her father makes the shocking announcement that he is going to marry Anneliese, Jordan tries to ask about the woman’s past. Sensing that Jordan does not trust her, Anneliese changes the subject by trying to convince Daniel to let Jordan go to college. Jordan again notices how Anneliese lights up at the mention of hunting but chastises herself for being so suspicious.
Chapter 5 Summary
In Vienna in April 1950, Ian discovers that Nina was Soviet, not Polish. Although Ian does not know much about Nina, she is a crucial accomplice because she witnessed the Huntress’s murder of his beloved brother Sebastian.
Chapter 6 Summary
In May 1937, as Nina traps rabbit near Lake Baikal, she meets a man with a felled plane. She decides that she too will learn to fly, because flying is the opposite of drowning.
Chapter 7 Summary
At Anneliese and Daniel’s wedding, Jordan discovers that Anneliese’s bouquet has a Nazi war medal wrapped around it. Jordan feels a sense of “confusion and horror” (70) as she contemplates her new stepmother’s past.
Chapter 8 Summary
In April 1950 in Altaussee, Ian and Tony talk to two Austrian women who remember the Huntress as Frau Becker, a nice woman who seemed harmless. Ian is testy with them and confronts them about the Huntress’s crimes because she killed his brother. Nina says that Sebastian saved her life before the Huntress killed him. Ian does not entirely trust Nina’s account and resolves to learn the truth about what really happened.
Chapter 9 Summary
In 1941, Nina is now an aviation instructor in Irkutsk. When she hears that war is declared between the Soviet Union and Germany, she knows she must fight the fascists. However, all the men, including her boyfriend Vladimir, are recruited before her.
When Nina encounters her father by surprise, he insists that she should go and fight. After learning that Marina Raskova, a famous Soviet aviatrix, is recruiting a regiment of women pilots, Nina buys a one-way ticket to Moscow.
Chapter 10 Summary
Jordan begins to notice that her new stepmother is dishonest. For example, Ruth insists that her mother played the violin, while Anneliese claims she has never picked up an instrument. However, Anneliese seems perfectly nice when she says that she will help change Daniel’s mind about allowing Jordan to go to college, even though she is a woman. Jordan has “nothing but reasons to like” (102) her new stepmother until an incident three months later on Selkie Lake.
Chapter 11 Summary
Ian tries to ask Nina about her experience with Sebastian and the Huntress, but to no avail. He learns that Nina allowed herself to pass as Polish because she did not want to be deported to the Soviet Union. It emerges that Sebastian and Nina became close; he confided in her that he was gay, while she admitted that she was Soviet. When Ian presses Nina for details about the killing, she is vague, telling him that Seb “died a hero” (112). Ian tells Nina that he and Tony will go to visit the Huntress’s mother in Salzburg. He adds that Nina may accompany them, as long as she agrees to follow their rules.
Chapter 12 Summary
In October 1941 in Moscow, Nina meets her heroine, Marina Raskova. After an intimidating interview, Marina agrees to let Nina enlist in the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, where female pilots train to be part of the Red Air Force. Although many of the other recruits are city-born and university-educated, Nina finds that for the first time in her life, she experiences a sense of solidarity amongst other women.
Chapter 13 Summary
In October 1946, at Selkie Lake, Jordan and her family go duck hunting at the family cabin. Jordan stays behind with Ruth while her father and Anneliese go on the hunt. When Anneliese returns with a smear of duck blood on her hand, Ruth begins to shake in a traumatized manner. Jordan is disturbed to notice that Anneliese’s initial reaction is a look of “hard, cool consideration” (124). When Jordan confronts her stepmother about what exactly traumatized Ruth at Altaussee, Anneliese repeats the same story about a refugee woman attacking her and Ruth and leaving the latter with a nosebleed. In an attempt to change the subject, Anneliese asks Jordan about the name Selkie Lake. Jordan explains that a selkie was a kind of water nymph found in Scottish mythology. Anneliese flinches when she instantly thinks of the rusalka, the “night witch that comes out of the water looking for blood” (125). Jordan instinctively feels that her stepmother is dangerous.
On Thanksgiving, Jordan asks her boyfriend Garrett to distract Anneliese, while she searches the woman’s room. Inside the cover of Anneliese’s Bible, she finds a photograph of her stepmother next to a much older man with his “one arm raised as if to wave to someone in the distance” (128). There is also an unidentifiable mark under the man’s upraised arm. The photograph is dated March 1942, and Jordan thinks it could be a souvenir of a lakeside vacation taken by Anneliese and her late husband. Nevertheless, she takes a snapshot of the photograph with her Leica before quickly replacing it.
Chapter 14 Summary
Posing as an ex-German soldier, Tony interviews and bribes Gretchen Vogt, the Huntress’s mother, in Salzburg. Gretchen named her daughter Lorelei after a water spirit. She also confirms that Lorelei, whose father taught her to hunt, was the mistress of an SS guard. Finally, Gretchen reveals that Lorelei sometimes writes to her from a Boston antique shop but gives no precise details of her location.
Nina impulsively climbs through Gretchen’s window, and Ian begrudgingly follows her. In the attic, Nina finds a photo album with the most recent picture Gretchen has of the Huntress. Nina steals the photograph.
Chapter 15 Summary
In October 1941, Nina is in Aviation Group 122, led by Marina. As she deepens her bond with her pretty Moscovite friend Yelena, Nina learns that while university-educated girls experience flying as scientific, she experiences it as instinctive. By the following February, Nina and Yelena are pilots with the all-female Night Bomber Regiment.
Chapter 16 Summary
At the McBride family’s Thanksgiving dinner, Anneliese surprises Jordan when she confronts her about going through her things. Jordan presents her father with the photographic evidence of Anneliese’s Nazi past, including her snapshot of the Iron Cross and the photograph with the SS guard. Anneliese claims that the Nazi was her father and that she put the Iron Cross ribbon around her wedding bouquet so that he would be able to give her away, in a manner of speaking. Jordan also accuses Anneliese of lying about her name and being Ruth’s mother. In tears, Anneliese claims that Ruth was a gift from God. She found Ruth alone and pretended that she was her daughter to prevent Daniel or anyone else from suspecting that the girl is Jewish. After this explanation, Jordan feels remorse and worries that she misinterpreted the evidence.
Chapter 17 Summary
Traumatized by an incident involving a green parachute, Ian is afraid of heights. Back at the Refugee Documentation Center, Nina, Ian, and Tony discuss going to Boston to find the Huntress. While Ian thinks that chasing her is futile because the United States has no jurisdiction about violent crimes committed abroad, Tony and Nina want to go and bring her to justice themselves. When Ian loses his temper at their disregard for protocol, they call him righteous and tell him to stop making excuses. Ian dismisses them from the office and fires Tony.
Chapter 18 Summary
Nina is paired with Yelena in a U2 plane, which they call the Rusalka. In addition to being “a perfect pair in the sky, moving like one” (184), the two become lovers.
Prologue-Chapter 18 Analysis
In the first part of her novel, Quinn sets out the distinct narrative strands of Ian, Nina and Jordan. At this early stage, each narrative takes place in its own temporal and geographical context, spanning the pre-war years in Nina’s case, the immediate postwar years in Jordan’s, and 1950 in Ian’s case, after the Nuremberg trials conclude. The three distinct timelines, which follow a prologue from the Huntress’s perspective after her escape in 1945, give an impression of her pervasiveness in the narrative. First, there is Nina, whose environment and early conditioning makes her a Huntress in her own right, even before she encounters Lorelei Vogt. Then, there is Jordan, who encounters the Huntress as a frail, refugee stepmother figure. Finally, there is Ian, who knows what she is and obsesses over finding her. While maintaining her distinctive narrative strand, Nina also joins Ian’s narrative as his estranged wife who witnessed the Huntress’s murder of Sebastian.
Nina and Ian both know that the Huntress is an amoral Nazi monster who sees killing as a sport. However, Jordan’s narrative strand, which shows how the Huntress ingratiated herself with a respectable American family and somehow picked up a child she passed off as her daughter, illustrates her capacity for adaptation and hiding. Unlike bold, aggressive Nina, who most embodies the malicious rusalka spirit, the Huntress is named after Lorelei, a milder water nymph from Germanic folklore. The author writes that Anneliese “looked gentle and frail and ladylike” (17) except when her “cruel” delight in hunting is caught on camera. Without Ian and Nina’s knowledge of the Huntress’s capacity for cruelty, Jordan is confused about the little signs that suggest that there is more behind the woman’s ladylike front.
Jordan’s process of gathering evidence and questioning herself indicates to the reader the difficulty of seeing through the Huntress’s efforts to pass as innocent. Through self-deception and rationalization, Jordan manages to forgive or dismiss evidence as glaring as a Nazi war-ribbon. Even when the Huntress changes her story when Jordan discovers that she is not Ruth’s mother, Jordan convinces herself that she “saw wrong” (162). The different temporal strands in the early part of the novel also create suspense, as the reader is left to question why Nina is adamant about killing the Huntress and what happened to each of the characters in the years between 1946 and 1950.
The motif of the lake and the figure of the rusalka also tie the narrative strands together. Unlike the “gray-faced” (4) male Nazi war criminals, the rusalka-like Huntress is feminine and folkloric in the small-scale, lakeside manner of her killing (4). Ian continues the water motif when he confirms that Lorelei is one of the “smaller fish” (4) who were not mass-killers and therefore likely to be overlooked. Moreover, the lake—whether Lake Rusalka, where the Huntress and her SS guard lover made their home, Lake Baikal of Siberia, where Nina grows up, Lake Altaussee in Austria, or Selkie Lake, near Boston—is a stretch of water whose serenity matches that of the Huntress. It is difficult to see what lies below the calm surface of either.
Finally, Quinn bases Nina’s all-female bomber regiment on historical fact. During World War II, the all-female 588th Bomber Regiment was so feared by the Nazis that any German pilot who successfully downed one of its planes received an Iron Cross medal. Nicknamed “The Night Witches” by the Germans, the 588th worked under the cover of darkness and never used radios, making them virtually impossible to track. To make themselves even more difficult to detect, the bombers turned off their engines as they approached a target, gliding the rest of the way on the wind. This was extraordinarily dangerous, particularly given the fact that many of the pilots did not carry parachutes. (Noggle, Anne. A Dance With Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1994.)
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