53 pages • 1 hour read
Ali BenjaminThe Thing About Jellyfish
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Purpose”
Prologue Summary: “Ghost Heart”
In this brief Prologue, Suzy, the protagonist, makes a comparison of the appearance of jellyfish to a beating heart thanks to the way jellyfish move through water. Suzy credits her seventh grade science teacher with a statistic: “Mrs. Turton says that if you lived to be eighty years old, your heart would beat three billion times” (2). Suzy describes death by drowning, attempting to picture the details like the coldness of the water. She points out that the heart of her friend Franny, who drowned, “beat only about 412 million times” (3).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Touch”
On a seventh grade field trip to the aquarium, 12-year-old Suzy Swanson sees others in her class listening to the guide and placing hands on the water’s surface to touch the rays. Suzy reveals that it is now “exactly one month since the Worst Thing had happened, and almost as long since I’d started not-talking” (8). The “Worst Thing” is the death of her former friend, Franny Jackson. Suzy used to be a consistent chatter box, but since Franny died, she has decided to keep her own pointless talk from cluttering up the world; she speaks only when necessary. Her parents have arranged for her to see a counselor, and her first appointment will take place that afternoon. Suzy separates from the group and wanders to the jellyfish exhibit. No one in the school group seems to notice when she walks away.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Sometimes Things Just Happen”
In the first of many italicized flashbacks, the narrative returns to a scene from a month ago when Suzy’s mom tells her that Franny drowned while she was in the ocean in Maryland. The news seems impossible to Suzy, as she knows that Franny was a good swimmer; Suzy reflects that “the way things ended between us was not the way they were supposed to end” (15). Two days went by between the drowning and Suzy’s learning about it, another part of the news she finds impossible to grasp. Suzy mentions the last time she saw Franny, when Franny was crying and walking down the school hallway carrying wet articles of clothing.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Invisible”
Back in real time, Suzy wanders to the jellyfish exhibit. She is fascinated by the Irukandji jellyfish in particular. Suzy reads that these jellies are the size of fingernails and that they have very potent venom. Victims experience pain and life-threatening symptoms, along with a tremendous “feeling of impending doom” (22). When Suzy reads that the Irukandji may migrate far around the world from Australia, where large numbers of the species live, she begins to hypothesize that an Irukandji stung Franny, resulting in Franny’s death. Suzy rejoins her school group but notices they did not miss her, nor did they see the jellyfish exhibit. She realizes that other students do not bother wondering about the true cause of Franny’s death.
Chapter 4 Summary: “How to Make a Friend”
In a brief flashback, Suzy reminds Franny how they met. They are five years old and taking swim lessons. Suzy and Franny wait on the pool’s edge together. When the instructor calls on them for turns on the kickboard, Franny surprises Suzy by submerging and swimming underwater. Suzy follows her newfound friend.
Chapter 5 Summary: “150 Million Stings”
On the way home from the aquarium trip, Suzy calculates that every second, somewhere in the world, four to five jellyfish stings occur. She counts to five repeatedly, conscious of the stings that happen with each passing second. At home, Suzy’s older brother Aaron is visiting their mother with his boyfriend Rocco. They want to take Suzy and Mom to the movies, but Suzy has an appointment with her counselor. Mom insists on giving Aaron and Rocco several kitchen implements she picked up at the thrift store. Aaron asks how Suzy is doing; when she doesn’t vocalize a response, he reminds her that “middle school sucks” (33). Aaron and Rocco leave as Suzy’s mind returns to the jellyfish stings that occur every second.
Prologue-Part 1 Analysis
After a brief Prologue, Part 1 introduces Suzy, the protagonist, and the novel’s mix of real-time chapters and flashback chapters. The book’s real-time chapters begin at the start of Suzy’s seventh grade year and continue sequentially until February of that year. Flashback chapters track the course of Suzy and Franny’s friendship from the time they met at five years old. The timing of the flashback chapters throughout the novel are clearly indicated for the reader, such as the start of fifth grade or the last day of sixth grade.
The novel consists of seven parts. Each of the seven parts stands for a sequential step in a formal science experiment whose goal is to prove a hypothesis. This structure symbolizes both Suzy’s interest in science, which is her favorite class, and Suzy’s external goal, which is to prove that a jellyfish sting caused Franny’s death.
The chapters that comprise Part 1, titled “Purpose,” set up Suzy’s rationale for the experiment: Franny was a young, healthy girl who was a good swimmer; therefore, Mom’s explanation for Franny’s death (that senseless things sometimes happen without reason) is insufficient for Suzy. Suzy believes a better reason must exist, and Suzy thinks she may have hit on the real cause of Franny’s death during the aquarium trip.
Suzy’s loneliness grows after Franny rejects her as a friend and the internal conflict Suzy experiences intensifies over the course of the flashbacks in the novel. Here in Part 1, no one in the seventh grade but Suzy visits the jellyfish exhibit, a moment that foreshadows the loneliness within Suzy that the reader will eventually see. Her loneliness at the jellyfish tank as she realizes that she is the only person to potentially know the truth about Franny’s death is immediately juxtaposed with a flashback to the moment when Suzy found a good friend in Franny; the two met in a large swimming pool, the water bringing them together in the easy way young children have of forming friendships: “…at this moment, making a friend, and having one, seems like the easiest thing in the world” (27).
Water imagery adds figurative language and irony to several scenes in Part 1. Sensory details convey the picture in Suzy’s head of the moments before Franny dies. The aquarium scenes include splashing, sea creatures, and underwater viewing. The flashback to swim lessons includes more water imagery. The author uses these images to demonstrate irony in the story: It is Franny’s natural swimming ability and her strength in the water that five-year-old Suzy finds irresistible in her new friend; later, however, Franny drowns.
Suzy’s character is complex even in these early chapters. She feels grief for her dead friend, but her grief is complicated by guilt and confusion due to the way their friendship ended. Suzy’s first-person point of view lends authenticity to her voice, and she uses rich vocabulary to focus on mature observations of others’ behaviors and motivations; these details suggest that Suzy is intelligent and thoughtful. Suzy is a character who possesses highly effective communication skills; again, the author employs irony when Suzy chooses to stop verbally communicating to others.
