55 pages • 1 hour read
Holly JacksonThe Reappearance of Rachel Price
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A 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 11-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
The mood at home between Rachel, Bel, and Charlie is intensely awkward. Rachel showers, and Charlie sets up the spare bedroom for her. Bel quietly asks Charlie if he thinks that Rachel is telling the truth. Looking confused, he says that he believes Rachel. They eat pizza, and Charlie confuses Bel and Rachel’s voices because both sound very similar.
Later that night, Bel cannot sleep. Her heart hammers as she thinks about Rachel sleeping in the next room. Suddenly, Rachel quietly enters Bel’s room, but Bel pretends to be asleep. Rachel looks at her for a while and then quietly leaves.
Chapter 12 Summary
The house feels strange and unsafe to Bel with Rachel in it. As Bel, Rachel, and Charlie eat breakfast together, Rachel keeps accidentally calling Bel “Anna,” which used to be Bel’s nickname as a baby. Rachel suggests that they invite Jeff, Sherry, and Carter over sometime.
Sherry and Jeff are amazed to see Rachel again. Rachel hugs Carte, and Bel notices that Rachel calls her sweetie and asks her many questions about herself. Ramsay arrives with his film crew, acting on a rumor that Rachel Price has returned. Charlie is annoyed that they are filming before the family has had a chance to adjust to the news themselves. Ramsay is amazed to see Rachel. He reflects that he will have to change the name of the documentary.
Chapter 13 Summary
The news of Rachel’s reappearance is shared with the world at a press conference. At home, Bel still feels uncomfortable with Rachel in the house. When Charlie leaves for work, Rachel suggests that she and Bel could go to the mall together. Bel agrees but suggests that the documentary crew should come as well. Rachel agrees but is clearly reluctant.
Chapter 14 Summary
They go to the White Mountain Mall, where Bel helps Rachel to find some new clothes. Ramsay and the crew follow at an inconspicuous distance, and Bel notices other people filming them and taking photos. Rachel refers to a gold bracelet with skulls that Bel used to have, and Bel is immediately suspicious because Rachel is accurately describing a bracelet that Bel used to own during the time frame when Rachel was missing. In this moment, Bel reflects that Rachel might be lying about everything. Rachel points out the coffee house where she used to work. She tells Bel that on the day they disappeared, she had been taking Bel for a cinnamon bun. She points out the bin that they hid in.
Later, Bel jokingly tells Ash that nothing new or exciting has been happening in her life. She considers telling Ash about her doubts regarding Rachel’s story; she feels drawn to Ash even though he irritates her, but because Ramsay and his crew are from London, she reflects that Ash will be returning to England soon.
Chapter 15 Summary
Carter and Bel walk to school together, and Bel tells Carter about the inconsistencies in Rachel’s story. Carter insists that it is typical of Bel to protectively push people away. Everyone at school is whispering about Rachel and staring at Bel. Mr. Tripp, one of Bel’s teachers, asks how Rachel is, and Bel tersely replies that she is fine. To Bel’s horror, Rachel arrives at the end of the school day and is excitedly greeted by teachers because she used to work at the school as an English teacher. Rachel offers to drive Bel and Carter home. Preferring to walk home, Bel lies and says that she has a biology assignment group meeting and goes back toward the school.
Chapter 16 Summary
Bel walks home via a route that takes her to the film crew's hotel. She talks to Ash, who observes that Bel seems troubled. Bel voices her suspicion that Rachel is lying and outlines the discrepancies in Rachel’s story and her impossible memory of Bel’s bracelet. Bel is relieved when Ash believes her. They speculate that money might have been the reason behind Rachel’s deception. Bel takes Ash’s camera and goes to Ramsay, filming as she goes. She asks Ramsay whether he worked with Rachel to manufacture her reappearance. She also asks him about other reported sightings of Rachel and decides that she and Ash should speak to the shop assistant from New Hampshire who reported seeing Rachel months earlier.
Chapter 17 Summary
As Bel guessed would happen, Ash is drawn in by a bright yellow t-shirt depicting a pug in Baa-Baa Boutique, the store where Rachel was allegedly sighted. She reminds him to focus. They speak to the store owner, who confirms that she reported seeing a woman who looked like Rachel. The woman was wearing a hat and a mask because the time frame was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of these details, the store owner later decided that she must have been mistaken. She shows Bel and Ash a grainy screen grab of the store’s CCTV footage. The original footage has been erased. The store owner tells Bel that the woman bought a red, long-sleeved top and black jeans. This detail is immediately significant to Bel because this is the same outfit that Rachel disappeared and reappeared in.
Chapter 18 Summary
Bel is disturbed to see Rachel’s new car parked where her father’s truck usually is in their driveway. Rachel is in Bel’s room, looking at her books. She asks to borrow Bel’s copy of The Memory Thief, which she is holding. Rachel tells Bel that Carter helped her to set up her phone. She also reveals that she has organized a group dinner with Jeff, Sherry, Carter, and Grandpa (Charlie’s father, Patrick). The film crew will record the event for the documentary. Bel resents Rachel being in her room and gives curt answers. She is relieved when Charlie returns home.
Chapter 19 Summary
The next day, Bel finds herself home alone and decides to snoop in Rachel’s room for clues. She finds a to-do list with her own name on it and feels unsettled. In the back of Rachel’s drawer, she finds a baby sock, which she assumes is her own. She wonders why Rachel has it and wonders whether the sock is evidence that Rachel planned to leave 16 years earlier and therefore took a keepsake. Bel keeps the sock.
Chapter 20 Summary
On Twitter, Bel finds a comment on a tweet of Ramsay’s, suggesting that he should do a documentary on the Rachel Price disappearance. Bel goes to the profile of the commenter, Lucas Ayer, who has no followers and no other tweets. This seems suspicious to Bel because it suggests that the account was made just for this reason.
Rachel is installing a lock on her door. She tells Bel that the lock will help her to sleep. She feels unsafe knowing that the man who locked her up is still at large, but Bel, who notices that the lock also locks the door from the outside, wonders if Rachel is installing the lock to stop Bel from snooping in her room. Bel asks Charlie whether they still have any of her baby clothes, and he says that they do not. Charlie is watching television and seems withdrawn. Bel reflects on the fact that he has been out of the house more and more often lately.
Chapters 11-20 Analysis
In this section of the novel, The Impact of Mistrust and Deception becomes even more prominent as Bel tries to parse fact from fiction in her parents’ strange relationship. The growing unease of the household is highlighted when she voices her worries by questioning Charlie, and with his awkward and stilted reply, she “could tell instantly the moment he’d walked in the kitchen and saw Rachel there” that he was disturbed by her return (91). In response to Bel’s suspicious questioning, Charlie’s repeated and impassioned insistence—“I’m happy she’s alive, of course I am” (91)—is designed to appear far less believable than a more measured response. His insincere protestations, combined with his increased absence from the house, indicate his suspicious behavior and foreshadow Bel’s later discovery that he has always been deeply involved in Rachel’s disappearance. His sudden evasiveness with Bel also intensifies this effect, and although the full realization of the mystery is yet to come, the author has already marked Charlie as a likely suspect in Bel’s unofficial investigation into her family’s past.
These early scenes are designed to suggest that although the Prices are playing the parts of a happily reunited family, sinister secrets lurk just beneath the surface. This impression is also emphasized in the press conference, when Bel reflects that she and Charlie are merely “props” to contextualize Rachel’s return and acknowledges that the family’s alleged happiness is far from genuine. As the narrative states, “Charlie and Bel never spoke, even though they’d been given microphones. They were just props, the picture of a reunited family” (106). Within this context, Bel’s determination to unravel Rachel’s deceptions takes on a new urgency, and Rachel’s impossible reference to a bracelet that Bel owned during the years of Rachel’s disappearance marks an important turning point in the narrative, and even Rachel realizes that she has made a misstep, as is illustrated by her widened eyes when Bel declares, “I don’t have that anymore” (117). As Bel uncovers more discrepancies in Rachel’s story, The Impact of Mistrust and Deception intensifies, and she wonders whether everything that Rachel has said about her disappearance is a lie. Additionally, the outfit bought at the boutique, which matches the one that Rachel reappears in, further strengthens Bel’s growing disquiet about her mother’s alleged kidnapping, as does the presence of the baby sock in Rachel’s drawer, which suggests an element of premeditation in Rachel’s departure 16 years earlier.
With these realizations, The Power of Instinct and Intuition becomes a guiding factor in Bel’s investigations, for her discoveries are not enough to convince the police to get involved, and Bel must rely upon her own ingenuity to discover the hidden secrets in her family’s past. Throughout the novel, the author uses Bel’s visceral reactions to events as an indicator of truth and a method of increasing tension. For example, when Bel discovers the significance of the purchase of the outfit in the boutique, it is enough to convince Bel to trust her sense that Rachel is being dishonest. As the narrative states, “The clothes meant something; a match lit under her, burning in her belly, proof enough that her gut feeling had been right all along” (144). The Power of Instinct and Intuition continues to operate as an important theme as Bel navigates the mystery of her mother’s abrupt reappearance, and the knot in Bel’s gut reappears frequently in the narrative, serving as a physical manifestation of Bel’s instinct that something is not right. As a result, Bel starts to feel unsafe in her own home, which feels increasingly contaminated with Rachel’s ominous presence. At this stage in the story, Rachel is characterized as a dangerous figure, inciting Bel’s fear as she begins to conceive of her mother as a lurking threat. The author’s descriptions of Rachel reflect this fear by crafting a sense of Rachel as the monster in a horror movie, an entity that lurks in the home and “could be anywhere, a figure in the shape of [Bel’s] mother, creeping around, laying claim to the house” (95). The verb “creeping” emphasizes that Rachel’s presence is deeply unsettling to Bel, and the passage also implies that Rachel has a nefarious motive for her return.
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