78 pages • 2 hours read
Jennifer Chambliss BertmanBook Scavenger
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Emily becomes fascinated with the Poe book and begins to read the story. The plot hinges on a cipher that leads to buried treasure. As she reads, she becomes distracted by the number of typos she finds in the book and circles them. When James looks at the typos, he realizes that the circled letters spell out complete words.
Later, Emily sees an article in the paper about Griswold and notices the logo for Bayside Press, his publishing company. It bears a strange similarity to the logo inside the Poe book, but the bird is black instead of a seagull, as in “The Gold-Bug.” Emily deduces that this particular book must have belonged to Griswold himself. Emily theorizes that Griswold hid the book at the BART station rather than entered it into the Book Scavenger site in order to start a new game.
Chapter 10 Summary
Emily dashes upstairs to James’s room to discuss her finds. They analyze the words that the typos reveal: fort, wild, home, rat, open, and belief. Unfortunately, none of the word combinations make sense as clues.
Later that morning, Emily’s family ventures on an outing to the enormous City Lights bookstore. Although she loves bookstores, Emily can’t enjoy the trip, distracted by the future when her family “[will] inevitably move again” (90).
Chapter 11 Summary
The following day is Columbus Day and a school holiday. James suggests a great hiding place for a book, so he and Emily go to Hollister’s Bookstore. The owner is a friend of Griswold’s though the two haven’t spoken in years. After Emily hides a copy of Inkheart in the store, the two youngsters explore Hollister’s collection of books by Edgar Allen Poe. The owner examines Emily’s copy of “The Gold-Bug” but doesn’t seem too interested. Hollister then gifts Emily a book of Poe’s short stories so that she can become more familiar with the author’s antiquated writing style.
When she scans Poe’s poem “The Raven,” Emily realizes that the bird in her copy of “The Gold-Bug” logo is also a raven. She also remembers a Book Scavenger player named Raven who gave her some useful information in the forum the day before. Emily goes online to get more information from Raven about “The Gold-Bug” but only receives cryptic answers. She concludes that Raven might be communicating in code. One of Raven’s replies suggests that Emily hasn’t yet found all the hidden words in Griswold’s book.
Chapter 12 Summary
The two thugs, Barry and Clyde, are still hanging around the BART station, hoping to catch a glimpse of the kids again. Barry is unnerved by Clyde’s coldness, as Clyde acts “Almost like he didn’t even remember” (106).
Since Barry found Emily’s Surly Wombat calling card at the site where the book was taken, he proposes that the two thugs search online for a reference to that name. After several tries, Barry stumbles across the Book Scavenger website. He and Clyde are closing in on Emily.
Chapter 13 Summary
Emily is nervous on her first day at a new school but having James as a friend is comforting. She thinks, “Knowing they’d be moving again soon enough helped Emily not care what people thought of her, but she still couldn’t help the first-day jitters” (111).
Emily notices that a girl named Maddie is unkind to her, though she isn’t sure why. Maddie, Emily, and James all share one class together—social studies. Their teacher, Mr. Quisling, is intimidating. He catches James passing a cipher note to Emily and intercepts it. Writing the cipher on the blackboard, Quisling begins to decode it.
Chapter 14 Summary
Much to Emily’s surprise, Quisling seems genuinely interested in the topic of codes. He tells the class, “The twists and turns history has taken have often relied on secret messages and whether those messages were able to remain secrets” (123). It takes the teacher very little time to crack the code and reveal James’s secret message: “Maybe the key is fort. I can think of three.” Fortunately, the words don’t refer to “The Gold-Bug.” Quisling challenges each student to come up with ciphers of their own that the rest of the class must solve over the course of the following two weeks.
After class, Maddie proposes a bet. She says that she will crack James’s code before he guesses hers. If he loses, James must shave the lock of hair on top of his head. If Maddie loses, she will have to dye her hair red with white blotches, like a mushroom cap. A week later, everyone succeeds in solving each other’s ciphers. Emily still hasn’t made any progress with the Poe book, so James suggests going to Bayside Press to see if Griswold left any clues to the new game in his office.
Chapter 15 Summary
At Bayside, the youngsters are stopped by a security guard in the lobby until Griswold’s personal assistant, Jack, intervenes and invites them upstairs. When they tell Jack that they believe they’ve discovered Griswold’s next game, the assistant shows them a pile of notes and letters which have all been sent in by people who believe that they’ve found clues to the publisher’s secret game.
Emily isn’t daunted by this comment; she is confident she has found the true game and determined to solve it. Jack offers to show them additional information from Griswold’s private files.
Chapters 9-15 Analysis
Solving a variety of puzzles dominates this set of chapters as several different characters start chasing down clues for different reasons. Bertman uses the different puzzles and their increasing complexity to build the rising action of the novel and create layers of intrigue to the central mystery. The developing puzzle of the Poe book also facilitates Emily and James’s growing friendship when she enlists the help of James in sorting out the meaning of the words.
Now the two have invented a coded language of their own to communicate between apartments and have secret conversations at school. One of these coded messages gets them into trouble when it is intercepted by Quisling, yet this also leads to an even more elaborate cipher game when Quisling challenges the class to come up with unsolvable ciphers. The cipher challenge escalates into warfare when Maddie dares James to beat her or lose his beloved lock of hair, setting up tension between James and Emily’s priorities, still anchored by the act of puzzle-solving.
Meanwhile, Emily’s commitment to the Book Scavenger game is only increasing, as she simultaneously builds a friendship with James yet cautiously avoids getting too attached to her temporary home. She creates new riddles for the website when she hides a copy of Inkheart in Hollister’s store for another gamer to find and the riddles related to the Poe book deepen beyond typos after Emily discovers the book’s raven logo is related to Griswold’s Bayside Press. She solves the initial riddle of why the book was left in the BART station in the first place and also realizes that an online player named Raven may hold additional answers to the book’s meaning. Emily’s focus on the game is presented as both the secret to her success, and a potential obstacle to developments in other areas of her life.
Emily and James aren’t the only people obsessed with riddles in these chapters. Barry and Clyde are on a clue hunt of their own after they see the kids take the Poe book from the BART station. Bertman also introduces new conflict in the subplot of Barry and Clyde by hinting at their different temperaments and capacities for violence, as Barry notices Clyde’s nonchalance over the attack on Griswold.
