46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate AllenThe Line Tender
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | 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.
Chapters 8-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Real Women”
Fred’s older sister Fiona takes him and Lucy into the city to visit a comics shop, a music store, and an art supply shop. Lucy and Fiona talk about the big-busted women on the comic book covers, with Fiona saying, “Real women don’t look like that” (58). Lucy admires Fiona’s sense of style, and the two try on different sunglasses while Fred meticulously inspects different music albums. He buys a Miles Davis album and some glasses that match the ones on the cover. Later that night, Lucy watches through her window as Fred, who is a budding musician, dances along with the Miles Davis album. She thinks that “Fred unrestrained [is] a good sight. […] [She has] the urge to run over and kiss him” (63). When Fred stops dancing to use his inhaler, he almost notices Lucy watching him from across the street.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Moon Snail”
The next day, Fred and Lucy go to Folly Cove to look for specimens for their field guide. Lucy draws the sea creatures while Fred investigates them, telling Lucy different science facts as he goes. Lucy claims that she is an art person, not a science person, but Fred explains scientific facts to her in stories that interest her. Fred is convinced that Lucy will be a science person one day, and Lucy believes him because he is “[n]ot only […] smart about academic stuff. He [is] smart about [her]” (72). Both of them are disappointed that the shark disappeared, so Fred offers to come over to Lucy’s house after they leave the cove so that they can look through her mother’s old textbooks for shark facts. Though Lucy has been apathetic about biology in the past, she agrees.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Meatballs”
When Lucy arrives home, her father is making meatballs for dinner. He apologizes for letting the refrigerator get so bare, saying that he’s been busy with work and the dive team. He tells her that the police discovered what happened to the missing shark: The line holding it up on the wharf snapped during the storm, and the shark fell into the harbor. Though there were several reports of people stealing it, they proved to be false. Lucy’s father notices that she seems unsettled by the fact that the shark is gone forever, but Lucy brushes off his questions.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Clasperhead!”
After dinner, Fred arrives at Lucy’s house to work on the field guide. Fred is more familiar than she is with where things are in Helen’s old office, so he shows her where to find the biology books. The two sit close together on the floor reading through facts while Lucy sketches. They read about how “some sharks have two vaginas [...] and two penises [...] called claspers” (84). These sexual facts embarrass Lucy, so she breaks the tension by making jokes, calling Fred a “clasperhead.” She asks Fred if he thinks her mother ever made any discoveries about sharks, and Fred shows her the file boxes of her mother’s research. The last research proposal she was working on before she died is about an increasing number of great white sharks off the coast of Massachusetts. It is dated May 1991, one month before she died. Fred asks to borrow the research, and Lucy agrees but makes him promise to bring it back.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Circle of Willis”
Lucy recounts the day her mother died. Helen went out early one morning on a research boat, and “sometime after lunch, she developed a terrible headache and started vomiting” (90). Helen had an aneurysm in her circle of Willis, which is a collection of blood vessels at the base of the brain. Lucy’s father met the ambulance at the hospital while Lucy waited with Mr. Patterson. Later, Mr. Patterson told Lucy that her mother had died.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Quarry”
The next day, Lucy goes to Fred’s house to work on the field guide. She runs into Fred’s sisters, Fiona and Bridget, who offer to do Lucy’s make up for her. Fiona does Lucy’s makeup, and Lucy appreciates the attention; she’s reminded of when she first got her period and Fred helped her find a tampon in his sisters’ bathroom. Fred is frustrated that his sisters are taking too long with Lucy, and he seems put off by her makeup. Fred’s mother, Maggie, comes upstairs and tells her daughters that they need to take Fred and Lucy to the party they’re headed to; Maggie wants her daughters to babysit so that they stay out of trouble with boys.
In the car, the girls reveal that they aren’t really going to a friend’s house; instead, they are headed to the quarries to go skinny dipping. When they arrive, the older teenagers jump naked into the quarry lake. Fred silently holds Lucy’s hand for the first time. Later that night, they pass beer around, and Lucy and Fred try some. Fred kisses Lucy and then persuades her to go swimming in the quarry with him. Lucy jumps in after Fred, but when she surfaces to show Fred the meteorite shower that’s started overhead, Fred is nowhere to be found.
Chapters 8-13 Analysis
These chapters develop the theme of Adolescence and First Love through Lucy’s awareness of her body and the growing romantic tension between her and Fred. When Lucy, Fiona, and Fred go to the city, Lucy’s inner monologue reveals that she is self-conscious about her own appearance and that she pays close attention to how other women look. Fiona is self-assured in her womanhood and appearance, which is reflected in her choice of sunglasses. Lucy watches her trying them on, thinking that “[on] her face, they [are] the perfect balance of weird and cool” (57).
Lucy notices that Fiona’s self-confidence allows her to pull off the “weird” glasses, transforming them into “cool” glasses. When she compares herself to how Fiona looks, Lucy thinks that Fiona is like “the front woman of a punk band and [Lucy is] a pubescent alien” (57). Lucy is aware of her puberty, and the awkwardness she feels about her appearance is a manifestation of this; her body hasn’t yet fully transformed into womanhood, which is why she constantly compares herself to older women, noting her differences to them. Fiona acts as a mother figure for Lucy, supporting her self-image and countering media messages about women’s bodies; when she sees Lucy observing the sexualized drawings of women on comic book covers, Fiona assures her that real women’s bodies do not look like that. This detail solidifies Fiona’s importance as a mentor character. It also highlights Lucy’s loneliness after her mother’s death since she has no one to turn to with these questions and concerns—even Lucy’s father has emotionally distanced himself from her after her mother died.
This scene at the comic book store is followed by another scene that reveals for the first time that Lucy has romantic feelings toward Fred, connecting her physical development to her emotional changes. The evening after their trip to city, Lucy secretly watches Fred from her room as he dances to a jazz album and feels attracted to him “like a magnet” (62). She “[has] the urge to run over and kiss him” (63). Until this point, Lucy and Fred have been close friends, but she hasn’t been physically attracted to him. The following day, Fred touches Lucy’s hair, “setting off a ripple of chills from [her] shoulder to [her] face […] [She] want[s] him to do it again” (66). Lucy’s changing feelings for Fred are also reflected in her awareness of how her body reacts to his touch, which indicates her developing sexuality. After, Lucy sketches Fred’s hand, which reflects her recent awareness of Fred’s body as well. Later that day, the two of them sit close together on the floor at Lucy’s house reading about the reproductive cycle of sharks. In this section, the author sets details about Lucy’s physical development alongside her growing desire for Fred to show how Lucy’s adolescence inspires her new feelings toward him.
The author includes two additional coming-of-age tropes in this section: the makeover scene and the teenage party scene. In popular culture, the makeover scene often marks a character’s transition from girlhood to womanhood. In The Line Tender, Fiona does Lucy’s makeup, reinforcing Fiona’s position as Lucy’s mentor figure and emphasizing that Lucy is on the brink of womanhood right before all of them head off to a party. This party scene represents how coming-of-age moments are often accidental and unplanned, often taking the characters by surprise. Here, Fred and Lucy’s attendance at the party is accidental. At the party, Lucy and Fred drink for the first time, which is another coming-of-age trope that represents that they are entering the world of adulthood. The scene culminates by showing that Fred and Lucy’s childhood friendship has grown into a romance as they share their first kiss at the quarry. In the final scene of this section, Lucy jumps into the quarry after Fred, symbolically leaping from the known world into the unknown.
