58 pages • 1 hour read
Kheryn CallenderHurricane Child
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Caroline Murphy wants to know where her mother is. She describes her mother, Doreen, as beautiful with an unexpected voice that is “rough and low” (1), and the sound reminds Caroline of a drum when she sings. Doreen sings under her breath because people say her voice is ugly, but Caroline loves everything about her mother and thinks of her often since she went missing one year and three days ago.
Determined to find her mother, Caroline goes where her father keeps his blue boat flipped over in a mangrove behind their house on Water Island. The mangrove is swampy and brown with mosquitoes and dead palms. Caroline secretly plans to take her father’s boat to find her mother, but she isn’t sure where to start looking, so she goes back to the house.
The narrative shifts as Caroline recalls a memory: She was with her mother on a speedboat owned by Mister Lochana, a neighbor on Water Island, who charged only five dollars instead of the usual 10 the ferry charged. It was a Sunday, and Caroline and her mother were going to Saint Thomas Island for church and groceries, and Mister Lochana’s speedboat hit a wave that knocked Caroline into the water. She sunk fast as her church clothes weighed her down—and she saw the woman in black standing on the bottom of the ocean. This is the first time she saw the woman in black—a spirit that appeared to her and is described as “blacker than black, blacker than even me” (4). Mister Lochana pulled Caroline from the ocean, and Doreen told him they would never use his boat again. However, they continued using his boat the next week, as they couldn’t afford the ferry.
Caroline then recalls another memory: Her father woke her up in the middle of the night and took her out in the blue boat to see glowing lights in the water. At first, Caroline was afraid; she suspected these glowing presences were the souls of slaves who were jealous of her freedom. However, her father tells her that they are just jellyfish and that they must have been lost because jellyfish never come to this island.
The narrative shifts back to the present. Caroline’s father leaves three hours before Caroline gets up for school, and he takes the ferry to work. He doesn’t use his blue boat anymore, and Mister Lochana takes Caroline to Saint Thomas for school.
Caroline hops into a safari taxi and passes the market. The market smells of fish and meat pies and restaurants. It also smells like salted stew and boiled plantain, which her mother used to get and share with her after church on Sundays with passion fruit juice. Tourists walk around the granite streets, and there is rum and fruit and shops selling postcards.
Caroline exits the taxi without paying because she gave her only quarters to Mister Lochana. The driver yells at her in French, causing others to look in her direction. She runs up the church steps and smacks into her teacher, Missus Wilhelmina, who witnessed her jump off the taxi without paying. Miss Wilhelmina pinches her ear and smacks her bum. She drags her through the church to the courtyard where the other students are. They move out of Miss Wilhelmina’s way, and Caroline talks back to her—and Missus Wilhelmina beats her until another teacher intervenes. Missus Wilhelmina orders her to leave school and never come back.
After leaving school, Caroline wanders aimlessly. As she walks around, Caroline sees the spirit of a little girl, but Caroline is unsure of where to go or what to do as she should be in school. When she gets home, her father tells her he talked to Miss Joe at school, and Caroline is allowed to come back the next day. Caroline ignores her father, instead thinking about what her mother would do if she were there and how none of this would have even happened if she was around. Caroline goes to her room and slams and locks the door. Her father calmly asks her to come out, but she ignores him. He calls her a brat and says he already has enough trouble without her antics. She doesn’t leave her room until he goes to work in the morning.
Chapter 2 Summary
Caroline recalls when her mother used to send postcards from her travels around the world. The mail would arrive, and Caroline and her father would sit at the kitchen table and open the postcards. There was a time when they stopped receiving them, and Caroline was afraid her mother had died, but then they started arriving again. When the postcards stopped for good, Caroline’s father put them away and told her they probably wouldn’t hear from her mother for a long time. He never explained why, and Caroline is determined to find out what happened.
When Caroline gets to school, a little girl announces her arrival to the rest of the students from inside the church. In the courtyard, everyone is standing there holding stones. Anise asks Caroline why she doesn’t have a mom anymore and says she heard her mother ran off with another man. Caroline isn’t sure if Anise actually heard or if she’s just making it up to be mean. Caroline says, “Same way your mom did?” and that “this is openly spread knowledge” (18). Anise is furious, and everyone throws their rocks at Caroline. Anise throws her rocks at Caroline’s eyes. Caroline grabs the rocks at her feet and throws them back—and hits Anise above her eye, knocking her to the ground.
Three teachers come outside, and everyone blames Caroline for the fight. Miss Joe talks to Caroline inside her disorganized and cramped office. She tells her she has two strikes against her, and Miss Joe will have no choice but to make Caroline leave the school if something like this happens again. “Every little girl needs her mother” (21) Miss Joe says before giving her a purple leather journal with a gold hibiscus flower on the front. She tells Caroline she should use the journal to write letters to her mother and then decide later on whether she wants to give those letters to her. This is the first gift Caroline has been given from someone besides her mom or dad.
Caroline hears Anise call her a female dog, but she uses the expletive instead. Anise says she had to get stitches and is scarred from the rock Caroline threw at her. There’s a girl who sits with Anise named Marie, but everyone calls her Marie Antoinette because she’s white. She never looks at Caroline in the same hateful ways that everyone else does, but she never says anything either. Marie keeps looking at Caroline throughout the day, so Caroline says hello to her in the hallway and asks her if she wants to go on a walk after school. Marie shakes her head after seeing Anise’s disapproval. The girls walk away laughing at Caroline, but Marie looks back over her shoulder at Caroline, as if she wishes she could have agreed.
Caroline goes home and her dad is still at work. She picks up the journal and contemplates whether she should write to her mother, but instead, she throws it as hard as she can, and it shatters the lamp her mother bought for her. She is devastated and runs outside to her dad’s blue boat. As Caroline gets the paddles, she sees the woman in black sitting across from her, but the woman is gone before Caroline can get a good look. She whispers, asking if the woman is her mom, but nobody is there. She can still feel her nearby until her father is calling her name repeatedly.
Caroline is covered in mud and tears by the time she makes it back to the house. She thinks her father is going to yell at her, but instead, he holds her, smoothing her hair down, which reminds her of her mother. She feels guilty she’s planning on leaving him all alone, just like her mother left.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The book’s epigraph sets the tone of the novel: “The spirits of this world, they don’t stay dead for long” (1). Caroline Murphy and Kalinda Francis can both see spirits, and this epigraph summarizes the haunting images around the island with the cemeteries, the Catholic school and church, and the ghosts the girls see.
The story begins with a flashback of Caroline’s mother singing Nina Simone’s “Blackbird,” which becomes a motif in the novel. The song symbolizes the past, and this is important; Caroline is still immature and unable to accept many aspects of her life and the lives of others. When Caroline goes to her father’s blue boat, she is “more ready than ever to get off this dumb rock” (1). Her attitude here and throughout these first chapters shows her frustration and naivety.
As Caroline searches for her mother, the character of Doreen exists in Caroline’s flashbacks and memories. Caroline tells the story about when she fell overboard, which sets up several subplots in the novel: missing her mother, the woman in black, and Mister Lochana as a savior. Each of these subplots has its own narrative arc that concludes in the final chapters. Caroline also describes a memory with her father on his blue boat at night where he takes her to see glowing jellyfish. She initially is afraid that the lights are ghosts of slaves, but her father reassures her and wants to share such a rare natural wonder with her. In these first chapters, Caroline develops a fear surrounding water and ghosts, and this becomes a character trait that she is forced to overcome as she learns to trust others.
Even while Caroline’s mother is absent, she remains omnipresent as Caroline passes the markets that remind her of Sundays spent drinking passion fruit juice and sharing a plate of salted stew and boiled plantain with her mother. Caroline asks her father to bring her to the market on Sundays like her mother used to, but he hasn’t. She says she misses the passion fruit juice most of all, which shows Caroline’s childlike nature, yet she is self-aware enough to be honest about her true intentions. This is an example of Caroline’s exceptional self-awareness. Despite being 12 years old, she is aware of her motives, even though she isn’t yet always sure of her emotions.
Despite being the smallest girl at school, Caroline is tough. When Missus Wilhelmina drags her through the church and beats her, Caroline continues to talk back to her. Her mood is apathetic afterward. Caroline’s attitude stems from her frustration over missing her mother, and her mother’s absence causes her to act out, though Miss Wilhelmina’s punitive discipline is inappropriate. Caroline shows her strength as she stands up for herself against an authority figure—an authority who is racist and targets Caroline for her darker skin. Caroline’s ability to question what is right and wrong is one of her mature traits. She recognizes when something is unjust, and even if her emotions get the best of her—like when she slams her bedroom door and ignores her father (15)—the novel portrays her plight sympathetically from the outset.
Opening the postcards as a morning ritual between Caroline and her father helps characterize their relationship and how they are dealing with the absence of Doreen. Now, Caroline’s father has put away the postcards, ending their morning ritual and symbolizing the end of hearing from Caroline’s mother. This shows what is at stake for Caroline. While she dealt with the fear of her mother’s death when the postcards periodically stopped, her hope returned when the letters did—but then she witnessed her father put them away when the mail stopped altogether, symbolizing his giving up hope. She is alone in her journey without her father’s hope, but she is ready to find answers.
Anise Fowler is an antagonist and bully, and the fact that it is “openly spread knowledge” (18) that Anise’s mother ran away with another man signifies the gossipy culture of the school. Caroline is constantly questioning what is true when it comes to school gossip, and she wonders whether Anise actually heard that her mother also ran away with someone. While providing background information for Anise, this is also foreshadowing in terms of Caroline finding her mother on the island. Caroline throwing rocks reflects her growing frustration and restlessness. To make things worse, she feels even more alone when Marie Antoinette turns her down for a walk. There is a shift in Caroline after she accidentally breaks the lamp her mother bought her and the woman in black arrives. The woman in black appears as Caroline is feeling immense loneliness as if a dark cloud has descended on her.
