55 pages • 1 hour read
Lisa GraffA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
As Marigold practices the oboe, she is distracted by thoughts of her missing red Talent-finding bracelet. V is drawn to the music, and Marigold kindly shows her how to play the instrument. Mrs. Asher asks Marigold to pack a care package for Mr. Asher, who is working in New Jersey. Marigold wants Zane to take care of the chore because she knows that he isn’t watching Will the way he’s supposed to watch him. She thinks that her life would be easier if she were more like her older brother, “a pain in the neck who didn’t care what anybody thought of him” (80).
Will crawls through the emporium’s air vents in search of his missing ferret. Through a grate, he sees the Owner “banging objects about on the bookshelf” (83) and notes with some confusion that the man is not floating as per usual.
The Owner keeps the Talents he’s stolen in a collection of empty peanut butter jars on his bookshelf. As he transfers the Talent he took from the man in the gray suit into a jar, some of it dissipates into the air vent. The Owner hears a faint sniffle but tells himself that no one is there.
Will has a sudden urge to tie a knot when a mist tickles his nose. He watches as the Owner takes something that looks like an ice cube from a jar and regains his ability to float. The boy suspects that he has stumbled upon an adventure, and his suspicion grows stronger when he sees the Owner pick his teeth with his mother’s hairpin. Pretending that he is “a brave knight whose job it was to retrieve precious stolen objects from spooky evil wizards” (87), Will wrenches the heavy grate off the vent, springs into the room, kicks the Owner’s shin, snatches the hairpin, and runs away. After the chapter, there is a recipe for Toby’s (Not Quite Perfect) Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting.
When Toby returns to the emporium, he sees the man in the gray suit intentionally leave his bicycle behind. Toby recognizes the 60-year-old woman playing the oboe and feels rattled. He decides that he and Cady must leave the emporium, which he considers “no place for a child” (93). Cady gives Toby a slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting and says that she wants to get to know him better. Toby feels that he must conceal much of his life from her, but he tells her truthfully that he’s traveled to Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. He omits that he was married and had a daughter in Africa. When he suggests that they leave on an overseas adventure of their own and find a new place to live at once, she reminds him that the bakeoff is that night. Cady tells him, “I do want to stay, you know [...] I really like it here. At the Emporium, I mean” (97). Toby resolves not to fail her like he failed his first daughter.
After Will runs off, the Owner directs his attention to the suitcase he bought from the gray-suited man. He has spent 53 years tracking down every powder blue St. Anthony’s suitcase ever made, and he hopes that this final case contains “his whole life” (98). However, when he rips open the lining, his mother’s peanut butter recipe isn’t there. With “a terrible roar” (99), the Owner throws the suitcase onto a counter in the emporium.
Cady hears the suitcase thump onto the counter and wonders why the object infuriated the Owner. She finds the suitcase and opens it. A recipe for “PERFECT PEANUT BUTTER” falls out of the lining “as though Fate had wanted her to find it” (101). Cady decides to bake a peanut butter cake for the Owner in the hope that Toby will want to stay at the emporium and keep her if the Owner is less grumpy.
Zane steals a number of objects from the Lost Luggage Emporium, including “cameras, the leather wallets, the rings, the belt buckles” (105), and secretes them in a powder blue suitcase. He plans to pawn the items and give the money to his parents to help pay for the repairs to their apartment. Zane hopes that this will keep his parents from sending him to boarding school. Sally falls out of an air vent and lands in the suitcase, where she spits out “the shiny bit of whatever it was she’d been hoarding” (105). He yells at the ferret, tosses her aside, and looks for a bicycle that he can ride to the pawn shop.
Still holding his mother’s hairpin, Will hides in one of the two powder blue suitcases on top of the emporium’s counter and falls asleep. After the chapter, there’s a recipe for Marigold’s Lime Pound Cake, which is described as full of zest.
Marigold looks for a suitcase that she can mail her father’s care package in and stumbles upon a suitcase filled with “[t]hings that a delinquent spiky-haired kid just might steal and sell at a pawn shop” (111). She finds her Talent bracelet among the pilfered items. Furious, she packs the things for her father on top of the stolen objects with the intention of sending the proof of Zane’s illicit hobby to her father. She is distracted by the mailwoman’s arrival and accidentally puts the shipping label on the suitcase that, unbeknownst to her, contains her little brother. After the mailwoman leaves, Marigold sees one of Will’s shoes and realizes what has happened.
Will wakes up and realizes that the suitcase is on a truck. When the vehicle swerves, the suitcase falls down a hill and tumbles open. Will smiles because he is “definitely on an adventure now” (116).
In the novel’s second section, cherished objects and a small child go missing as the plot accelerates. Chapter 2 states that eight people will lose what they treasure most, and Chapters 13 and 14 show that these things are not necessarily their Talents. Mrs. Asher’s hairpin, Marigold’s bracelet, and Will’s pet ferret are among the first treasures to go missing. The missing bracelet advances the plot and the themes of Family Connections and Identity and Self-Discovery because its disappearance intensifies Marigold’s insecurities and resentment. Sometimes, family connections can be tense, as evidenced by this section. Mrs. Asher doesn’t understand how being Talentless weighs on Marigold: “You’re my responsible one, Marigold [...] and I would like you to do this simple favor for your father. You’ll have plenty of time for Talent-fishing later” (80). Marigold suspects that her mother expects her to be more responsible and compliant than Zane because she’s a girl and doesn’t have a Talent. The bracelet exacerbates the already strained relationship between Zane and Marigold when she mistakenly believes that her brother stole the piece of jewelry with the intention of pawning it. As a result, she becomes “puffed with rage” (112) and accidentally gives Will to the mailwoman.
Graff employs onomatopoeia and repetition for stylistic effect in this section. For example, Chapter 23 contains a wealth of sound effects to bring Will’s rocky journey in the suitcase to life:
Thump-a-thump-a-thump-a! The truck swerved. Screech! The suitcase bounced up…Fwoop!...and then down…Tha-WUNK!...and then it rolled over, over, over down a hill…Crash tumble crash!...through a thicket of weeds and bushes…Schwick-a-schwick-a-schwick-a! (116)
This excerpt contains examples of onomatopoeia that readers will already be familiar with, such as “crash” and “screech,” while also creating new sound effects to capture the precise noises of the suitcase’s tumbling progress from the back of the mail truck to a field. Another technique that Graff uses is repetition, which helps her place emphasis on important objects and provide foreshadowing. For instance, Mrs. Asher’s hairpin is described in six different chapters in largely the same language: “beige and cracked and knobby, as wide as a rib of celery and as long as a pencil” (42). This repeated description makes it clear that the hairpin is a bone and is highly important to the story. The hairpin has an innate significance because it is an immensely valuable missing fossil. Additionally, Will’s efforts to rescue his mother’s pin lead to his misadventure with the suitcase. On five occasions, the narrator notes that the powder blue suitcase is “boxy and large as a small child” (3). Will’s disappearance fulfills the foreshadowing in this description and raises the novel’s stakes.
These chapters also progress the theme of Destiny Versus Chance. In Chapter 17, the traveling salesman who represents fate deliberately leaves his bicycle behind as if he knows Zane will use it to take the Talent jars away from the Owner in a future section. In Chapter 19, Cady locates the peanut butter recipe “as though Fate had wanted her to find it” (101). Her decision to make the Owner a cake relates to her earnest desire for Family Connections and sets much of the remainder of the plot into motion.
By Lisa Graff