52 pages • 1 hour read
Dhonielle ClaytonThe Marvellers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Arcanum Secrets”
Part 3, Chapters 16-18 Summary
This summary section includes “Fournier’s Curious Clockwork,” Chapter 16: “Extended Vacations,” Chapter 17: “The Gatherfeast & Returned Starposts,” Chapter 18: “The Rotties & Hot Maps,” and “The Aces.”
In Betelmore, Gia enters a clock shop in disguise and talks to the owner, Fabian, who testified against her at her trial. Gia forces him to drink a potion, extracts his magical power, and seals it in a vial. She needs Fabian’s marvel to use a watch from his shop that can stop time.
The students return to the Arcanum after the holidays end, and Ella receives a request to visit Masterji in his office. When she arrives, she finds a note stating that Masterji is on an extended vacation. Headmarveller Rivera arrives to explain, saying, “It happens to the best of us, and I don’t think we should hold it against him, Ella. Sometimes vacations extend” (261). Ella doesn’t believe the Headmarveller and alerts Jason and Brigit to her concerns.
On their first evening back, the students assemble for a Gatherfeast to celebrate the union of all the magical communities. Headmarveller MacDonald says, “The wolf is a lucky animal who always adapts for winter. We are like the wolf. We evolved and prepared for life away from Fewels. Now all the magical people live in harmony” (269). After the ceremony, Ella tries posting a letter to Masterji, asking why he missed their appointment. The postbox ejects the message and stamps it “Return to Sender” (272). Ella tells Brigit and Jason about a conjuring spell called a hot map that will allow a person to track the footsteps of another. She intends to use this magic to find out where Masterji went. With the help of her friends, she sneaks the necessary supplies out of Aunt Sera’s classroom to perform the spell.
Meanwhile, the newspapers report strange occurrences in one of the Marveller cities: “Betelmore Infirmary reports three people admitted with missing marvels. They cannot use them. Their gifts have disappeared” (274).
Riding in an air trolley above Betelmore, Gia awaits the arrival of the other Aces who attended school with her at the academy. She’s soon joined by Benjamin Mackenzie and Linh Nguyen. The final member of the group, Celeste Baptiste, is the long-lost twin sister of Ella’s mother. Celeste went missing during a visit to the sky cities years earlier. Gia places a spell on the other Aces that prevents them from saying anything she doesn’t want them to: “She smile[s], reveling in how her gag still worked so many years later” (285). Celeste arrives with potions that will undo the spell, but Gia tells her, “I am nothing if not loyal. You have maintained yours to me. Never speaking ill against me. You may have your true tongue back” (287).
Part 3, Chapters 19-21 Summary
This summary section includes Chapter 19: “Masterji Thakur’s Lair,” “Forbidden Plants,” Chapter 20: “Dean Nabokova,” and Chapter 21: “Secrets & Gags.”
Ella awakens in the morning to discover that her dorm room has been trashed and accusatory messages left behind: “CONJURORS AREN’T REAL MARVELLERS! GO HOME, YOU DON’T BELONG HERE! NO BAD LIGHT, NO CONJURORS ALLOWED! YOU LET THAT CRIMINAL OUT OF THE CARDS!” (289-90). Although Ella feels disturbed to be the target of such hatred, she and her friends proceed to mix the ingredients necessary to make a hot map that will show them Masterji’s trail. They go to his office to perform the ritual. Once activated, the map shows Masterji walking in circles in his office, and Ella concludes that he never left the Arcanum at all.
Gia pays a visit to a plant vendor in Betelmore, seeking a rare and forbidden plant called the red Quassia. The shopkeeper sells it to her but cautions that it is highly poisonous: “This particular species doesn’t work for everyone. It’s temperamental. Very few non-Conjurors can earn its full allegiance. I cannot guarantee it will behave” (300).
The winter turns into spring as Ella racks her brains, trying to figure out what happened to Masterji. The atmosphere in the school remains tense as parents begin removing their children from the Arcanum. With Gia on the loose and blame being cast on Conjurors for letting her escape, Ella experiences more hostility than usual from her classmates and teachers. One day, as she tries to help Brigit answer a question, her teacher accuses her of talking out of turn and sends her to Dean Nabokova, the school disciplinarian.
Nabokova has a reputation for being harsh and a known dislike of Conjurors. She has surveillance footage of Ella inside Masterji’s office and a report that Ella was also in the forbidden Founder’s Room. Nabokova implies that it was a mistake to allow Ella into the Arcanum. Nabokova assigns a Minder Model to follow Ella for six weeks to make sure she behaves. The Dean says, “Either we see an improvement, or perhaps decide once and for all that this place is not for you” (308).
Ella goes to visit her Aunt Sera, who warns her against acting out because everyone is on edge: “The world is chaos right now. Between the breach in the Cards and kids being taken out of the Arcanum and you being targeted…it’s all a lot” (311-12). Ella confides her worries about Masterji. She describes the two incidents during which he tried to tell her something about Conjurors in the Arcanum, but his words were choked off. Aunt Sera believes that he was placed under a gag spell to protect Marveller secrets: “This place has a nest of secrets like a mother bird squatting on her eggs [...] with us here, that carefully constructed nest is showing its edges, and they’re scared of it unraveling. Some things might fall” (313).
Part 3, Chapters 22-23 Summary
This summary section includes “Fussy Reactants,” Chapter 22: “Yarn Prophecies!” and Chapter 23: “Alibis!”
Gia hides in her lair, struggling to coax the red Quassia plant to cooperate. She’s abducted and imprisoned an old friend, the Ace of Hearts, to help her with it: “She glare[s]. Her prisoner sway[s], chains creaking, and he reek[s] like a foul monster buried in a forgotten dungeon” (314). Believing he can get the plant to give her what she wants, Gia tells him what she hopes to achieve with it: “Nothing will ever be taken from me again. I will be the most powerful Marveller in the whole world. Never to be imprisoned again. Never to be underestimated” (316).
At school, Brigit hopes that her visionary knitting might offer a clue to Masterji’s whereabouts. She goes to knit in the menagerie, where she won’t be interrupted. With Jason and Ella looking on, she creates an image of Masterji and has a vision that he is being held prisoner somewhere. Brigit tells her friends, “I could see him. He was mixing this and that. But sweating. He looked upset. Like he didn’t want to do it. I’ve never seen him look so angry. Not since that day at orientation when he yelled about the Aces” (319).
April turns to May with Ella and her friends no closer to solving the mystery of Masterji’s whereabouts. Headmarveller MacDonald summons Ella to his office to meet with him and Headmarveller Rivera, who tells Ella that Clare Lumen—Ella’s original roommate—claims Ella has been threatening her. Clare’s father, an influential politician, opposes integrating the academy. The Headmarvellers play a recording and “ Ella hear[s] her own voice saying words she’[s] never said before, then Clare screaming in response and the sound of fists” (325). Ella denies that the voice is hers, but the Headmarvellers remain skeptical. MacDonald says, “The incident will be brought before the Arcanum Lower School Disciplinary Board. Dean Nabokova will oversee it, and all evidence will be presented and reviewed to determine if you’re fit to stay with us” (326).
Part 3 Analysis
The novel’s third segment further emphasizes The Challenges of Integration as the hostility and abuse Ella receives from her classmates escalates after Gia escapes, underscoring the prejudicial view of Conjurors that extends into the wider magical world beyond the Arcanum. Because Gia’s prison was built and maintained in the Underworld—the domain of Conjurors—her escape casts suspicion and derision on the Conjuror community at large. As the Arcanum’s only Conjuror student, Ella bears the brunt of that animosity, judged guilty by association, pointing to the ways in which widespread prejudice complicates Navigating Questions of Identity. While Marveller students had already treated Ella as a pariah, Marveller parents raise the stakes by pulling their children out of the Arcanum so they won’t be in contact with a Conjuror, escalating the dramatic tension in the narrative. Several of Ella’s teachers perpetuate this bigotry by singling Ella out for discipline. For example, Dean Nabokova accepts the word of other students over Ella’s and punishes her for alleged poor behavior without evidence. She assigns a monitor to report Ella’s every action, reinforcing her ostracization from the rest of the students.
As the novel moves toward the climax, Clayton makes Ella’s situation at the Arcanum progressively more untenable, pushing her protagonist toward action. When Clare Lumen produces a recording of Ella attacking her, Ella’s inability to prove an alibi makes her appear guilty. The Headmarvellers call for a disciplinary hearing, threatening Ella with expulsion from the Arcanum—a move that will signal a return to the status quo of segregation that Ella’s presence at the school disrupted. Clayton positions Clare’s family—the Lumens—as representative of Marveller society’s entrenched systems of power. Clare’s father publishes an article demanding an end to what he perceives as an integration experiment. His exhortation to “Make the Marvellian World Light Again!” evokes contemporary white supremacist rhetoric that further reinforces Clayton’s parallel between the conflicts in The Marvellers and a history of racial injustice (273).
As Clayton previously established, conjure magic originated in Africa, so Clare’s father’s statement also implies a belief that Marvelling magic is for non-Africans, undergirding his demands with racialized undertones.
Clayton uses Ella’s relationship with her mentor, Masterji, to provide clues of the inherent oppression of Marveller ideology and culture established long before her admittance to the Arcanum. Every time Masterji tries to tell Ella about the Aces or the connection between the Arcanum and Conjurors, a gag spell prevents him from speaking. As Aunt Sera points out, power self-protects, and the Marvelling world wants to protect its secrets. Keeping them from becoming common knowledge is a way to reify their own power. Aunt Sera explains gag spells to Ella, saying,
It’s the muzzle. [...] A way to silence you. I’d heard rumors about how the Marvellian government makes sure that certain things are never spoken of. They don’t like their secrets out. They silence those they don’t want talking (312).
Gia perpetuates the discrimination and oppression she has experienced at the hands of the magical world, believing it’s the only way to achieve freedom and autonomy. Years earlier, she placed a gag spell on the other Aces so they couldn’t speak about their experiences in the Aces. Their voices are cut off if they try, creating an artificial separation between them and the truth. After her escape, Gia kidnaps and imprisons Masterji, forcing him into her service, because she believes it’s necessary to destroy the systems of power that oppress her and others like her. The trauma Gia suffered underscores The Inherent Injustice of Segregation and drives her to believe that there can be no peace between herself and her oppressors, only violence and revenge. As she explains to Masterji: “Nothing will ever be taken from me again. I will be the most powerful Marveller in the whole world. Never to be imprisoned again. Never to be underestimated” (316).
Forced to exist in a world of one long before her incarceration, Gia’s determination to exploit everything and everyone in her path to achieve her ultimate objective demonstrates her belief that vengeance and isolation are all that’s left to her.
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