74 pages • 2 hours read
Shannon MessengerKeeper of the Lost Cities
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Search for Acceptance
As a young child, Sophie felt out of place in the human world. Now that she’s joined her native elves, she still struggles to find acceptance. Her school is highly competitive, both academically and socially. As a newcomer, she generates hostility from Councillor Bronte, fellow student Stina, and her best friend Fitz’s sister Biana. At the very least, she’s an anomaly; at worst, she’s a mutant. Sophie must come to terms with all these doubts before she can find the acceptance she needs.
Living in San Diego, Sophie already has trouble dealing with humans. She’s smarter than nearly everyone else—already, she’s had to turn down an offer to study at Yale—but being a high school senior at age 12 has its drawbacks, including bullying and rejection. Worse, she can hear the thoughts of everyone around her. The stress gives her headaches and makes her feel like a freak.
Fitz introduces her to her elven heritage. Suddenly she understands why she feels out-of-place among the humans. This sense of inferiority, though, is replaced by a new set of doubts because she’s a girl ignorant of the most basic norms among the elves. She plays a fast game of catch-up, and this helps, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’ll always be an outsider.
Long accustomed to being the smartest person in her classroom, Sophie now must struggle to keep up at the elite Foxfire academy. The girl who once got straight A’s now fears she’ll flunk out. This does bad things to her self-confidence.
Biana, Fitz’s sister, is snooty toward Sophie. Dex says, “She’s just jealous. She’s used to being the prettiest girl in school” (205). It’s not until Alden forces Biana to befriend Sophie that the two girls get to know each other and bond. Despite this, Sophie still fears she’ll never truly belong.
Her guardians, Grady and Edaline, lost a daughter and see Sophie as a child with whom they can resume the loving work of parenting. Sophie, too, has lost family, and they all begin to bond and rebuild a sense of togetherness. This goes well until Sophie exhibits a willingness to take risks to help others—in particular, a bird that needs fire to survive—which so upsets Edaline, whose daughter died in a fire, that she and Grady pull away from Sophie. Once again, the girl feels a devastating loss.
In all, Sophie seriously underestimates herself. When she and Dex evade mysterious kidnappers, their escape nearly kills her, but her friends rush to her aid. She discovers that none of them, including Grady and Edaline, has rejected her, and that all want her in their lives, safe and sound.
Sophie learns a critical lesson: She can be weirdly different from others yet still loved by them. She thus realizes she can truly accept herself. In so doing, she fully accepts the loving friendship around her and can express without qualms or fears her love for them. She knows that she and they are bonded and that this love is unbreakable.
The Trouble with Secrets
Secrets haunt Sophie. She’s spent her life among humans keeping secret her telepathic ability. Her newfound elvin friends won’t tell her what’s happening with the fires threatening her human family. Mysterious messages hint at things she must do but don’t explain why. Arcane elf laws cause her grief when she learns about them only through violating them. She’s also under strict instructions not to reveal her telepathic power to other elves. Most troubling of all, Sophie carries several secrets in her brain that are hidden even from herself. Her chief task in the story is to unravel all these secrets and sidestep the dangers of ignorance.
Though she enjoys her early encounters with the elves, Sophie chafes at their refusal to keep her informed about her parents during the fires. Forbidden to use her telepathic power to ferret out the truth, Sophie must ask for information and suffer rebuffs. She decides to find out for herself as much as she can. Over time, she gets Alden and Fitz to leak bits of information about the fires, which helps her when she decides to visit the fires and gather evidence.
Sophie must remain silent about her abilities. She’s something of a state secret: Her friends and teachers at school must remain in the dark about her extraordinary power, which rankles. To Dex, she says, “I hate keeping secrets from you. You’re my best friend” (298). Later, when they’re kidnapped, she tosses aside the secrecy rule and tells him about her powers and the problems they’ve caused.
Chief among the frustrating secrets are the ones hidden inside her mind, planted there by the renegade group, the Black Swan. The secrets she carries are protected by her brain’s powerful block against mind readers. It’s up to her to tease them out. She uses a memory log, a book of blank pages onto which she can project images of her memories. Slowly she pieces together the Black Swan’s plans for her.
Sophie worries she may be a bad person whose evil is hidden in these secrets. At first, she’s reluctant to share her insights with Alden, fearing it might get her into more trouble. Finally, she realizes she needs his help and that it’s better to be open with him than closed. Thus, one of the hardest parts about her secrets involves trusting others not to misuse them or her.
In the end, the secret that is Sophie is revealed. Sophie prefers the refreshing openness of the new policy. Her friends’ love and affection remain unchanged. For her, it’s a better world when she can be above board with everyone. What remains unknown, though, still lies buried in the depths of her mind—secrets yet to uncover.
Doing What’s Right Instead of What’s Allowed
In the elvin world, laws are strict, obedience is expected, and penalties can be severe. Most of the laws are reasonable and fair, and it’s unusual for an elf to break one. Sophie, a recent immigrant to the elf realm, struggles with conflicts between her old moral views, which include compassion for humans, and the new elf laws that forbid contact with them. She also possesses powerful super-abilities that offer her opportunities, despite the laws, to help others. Sophie must resolve the resulting conflict between what’s right and what’s permitted.
Sophie realizes she’s likely to flunk her Alchemy course unless she breaks the law and peers into the mind of her Mentor, Lady Galvin. She does so but immediately regrets it and confesses to Alden. She receives several weeks of school detention, but her elders admire her honesty and ability to make good distinctions between right and wrong.
Sophie learns that her moral instincts won’t always jibe with those of her fellow elves. When a bird at Grady and Edaline’s nature sanctuary suffers for no reason, Sophie reads its mind and realizes it needs fire to keep warm. She sets ablaze a pile of leaves, and the bird, a flareadon, promptly dives into them, her fireproof exterior protecting her while the flames warm her metabolism. The bird, named Gildie, bonds with Sophie, but Edaline is horrified at the thought of yet another daughter dangerously involved with fire, and she cancels the application to adopt Sophie. The girl thus learns that good deeds can get her into trouble in her new life.
Sophie hears rumors about fires ignited near cities around the world. She suffers nightmares in which her human family becomes trapped in a burning house, and later she sees a transmission that shows them in an evacuation center.
Unwilling to stand aside when her original family faces peril, she brings a fire-catching bottle and Gildie to the fires, where the bird puts fiery evidence into the bottle. Alden takes it to the Council as evidence of the threat.
Her action gets her into big trouble, but she declares she would rather be punished than do nothing now and regret it always. Moved by her honesty and goodness, the Council forgives her legal transgressions by declaring that her subsequent suffering at the hands of kidnappers is punishment enough.
Sophie evades the kidnappers by light leaping without protection while carrying the wounded Dex. This nearly kills her, but it saves the day. Sophie’s deeds enhance elven society, her resolve validates her integrity, and she learns that she can and will do the right thing even if it costs her.
