86 pages • 2 hours read
Elizabeth AcevedoClap When You Land
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | YA | Published in 2020A 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 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Camino”
The novel’s first poem is set in Camino Rios’s perspective as she muses on the mud from her barrio that she must wipe clean each night. Camino wants to be a doctor, following in her aunt Tía Solana’s tradition of caring for others. Camino vows she will provide a better life for her aunt: “I will make it. / I will make it. / I will make it easier for us both” (7).
In the morning, Camino and Tía Solana lock up their house and travel to tend to a woman in their community who is bedridden with cancer. A stray dog named Vira Lata accompanies them. Camino helps feed the woman a drink of water while Tía Solana lights incense in the corners of the room. Tía Solana is a healer in the neighborhood. She has raised Camino since her mother’s death with some monetary help from Camino’s father, Papi, and mentors Camino in homeopathic treatments and spiritual ceremonies. Together, Camino and Tía Solana place their hands on the woman’s stomach, bloated by cancer, and chant. Camino is careful not to let her feelings about the woman’s dire condition be known, reflecting, “You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities” (5).
Although it is Camino’s birthday, Tía Solana and Camino have prepared all of Papi’s favorite foods in anticipation of his arrival: “Seasoning & stewing goat, stirring a big pot of sancocho” (9). Camino skips school to travel to the airport, getting a ride from one of Camino’s neighbors, Don Mateo, who works as an unofficial taxi driver. When the arrivals screen goes blank, a crowd forms, and an attendant announces that flight 1112, Papi’s flight, has crashed. Confused and in shock, Camino walks four miles home. She tries to act as if nothing has changed.
Later, Camino recounts the day of her birth, when her father was absent: “busy / in New York City” (13). She recalls when she told Papi that her plan was to attend Columbia in New York, to which Papi replied that she could be a doctor at home in Sosúa, laughing as he dismissed her ambition. This is among the last memories she has of her father: “He did not apologize” (15).
As her interior monologue continues, Camino actively refuses to believe what has happened. She creates elaborate scenarios in which Papi misses his alarm, or is delayed on route to the airport, narrowly avoiding the fated flight. When she gets home, Tía Solana holds her and moans with grief, but it is not until later that night, while sitting alone on her porch waiting for her father’s miraculous arrival, that she realizes that Papi will never return.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Yahaira”
When Yahaira finds out about Papi’s death, she is at school with her girlfriend, Dre. They are going over plans for an environmental protest rally when Yahaira is called to the principal’s office. Yahaira is not accustomed to being reprimanded; she has a reputation for being an obedient student who seldom breaks rules. When she arrives at the office, her mother is there, wearing slippers and house clothes, a rare sight for Mami, who, Yahaira says, “never leaves the house anything less / than Ms. Universe–perfect” (24). Mami tells her that the tail on her father’s plane snapped, forcing the aircraft to strike the ocean vertically and sink. Although Mami cries all the way home, Yahaira does not. Instead, Yahaira dutifully answers the phone calls from family that Mami is too grief-stricken to receive. In the chapter’s final poem, we learn that Yahaira had learned of her father’s secret before his death and did what she is doing now: obediently completing her chores, keeping her feelings quiet.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Camino”
Camino’s friend Carline, who is Haitian, comes to Camino’s home to pay her respects. Carline, who is pregnant, works at a resort on the beach on the outskirts of Camino’s neighborhood. Although she does her best to comfort Camino, Camino feels she cannot share her real feelings with Carline, who is already dealing with so much. After Carline is called away, a small vigil of neighbors and friends of Papi’s forms outside of Camino and Tía Solana’s home, where they have come to pray for him. Although he was often in America, the crowd is a testament to Papi’s important standing in the community. A full day after the events of Papi’s plane crash, no bodies have been identified.
Camino describes the home they live in, the prettiest house in their neighborhood because of Papi’s various efforts. Unlike other homes there, Camino’s house is tiled to protect from inevitable floods, and in preparation of constant rolling blackouts, Papi has purchased a generator. Camino’s home is just a three-minute walk to the beach where she swims. She feels a spiritual connection to the water, which reminds her of her father’s swimming lessons and her ambitions that lie beyond the ocean. After escaping her home of grieving family members and neighbors, Camino swims until dark. A whistle from the shore cuts her revelry. It is El Cero, a pimp who prostitutes underage girls to American tourists. Although Papi had been paying El Cero to leave her alone since the time she turned 13, El Cero has taken to following Camino around the neighborhood. El Cero watches her lasciviously from the shore and gives his condolences as Camino dresses quickly to leave. As she walks home, Camino considers a rumor that El Cero has not been the same since his younger sister succumbed to dengue during the same hurricane-led outbreak that claimed Camino’s mother.
At home, Camino and Tía Solana fall into a delicate routine of household tasks. Camino suspects that Tía Solana’s hushed phone calls are funeral arrangements being made in secret.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Acevedo has constructed Clap When You Land with duality in mind, as the novel switches between Camino and Yahaira’s first-person accounts,. Especially in the novel’s earliest poems, the author invites us to compare Camino and Yahaira—their lives, ambitions, and immense pain following the loss of their father. By including these ambidextrous perspectives, the story teases out themes of duality, which run throughout the narrative. Every character in Clap When You Land hides a shadow self: deeper pain, secrets, or ambitions that are revealed slowly.
In Camino’s introductory poems, her life is characterized by a constant desire for escape, represented elementally by water. It is ironic that Camino is never so at peace as when she is swimming but is often constantly at odds with the mud of her neighborhood in Sosúa. The novel’s first poem paints mud as a hungry and corrosive marker of her life, even despite its intrinsic connection to water. Like many of the symbols and images at work in Clap When You Land, water is complicated, carrying positive connotations but also bringing the outbreak of dengue that killed Camino’s mother. When Papi’s plane goes down, Camino muses that his fabled prowess for swimming would be enough to bring him home. Like all things in Clap When You Land, water is dualistic—a giver and taker of life.
By refusing to compare El Cero and Papi, Camino invites comparison of the two. Papi’s ambivalent nature in the text comes into further question when he and El Cero are both described as “hustlers.” Although Camino refers to the ways Papi built a career, there is a double meaning here that suggests Papi’s status as a trickster. The narrative’s central conflict is that before his death, Papi was leading alternating lives with two different families, existing between his persona in New York and his persona in the Dominican Republic. In Papi there exists a moral ambiguity that Yahaira and Camino both struggle to reconcile. The text complicates Papi, suggesting that Papi’s contradictions are at the center of his character. While Papi deceived Camino, he still worked hard to ensure that Camino knew she was loved, never missing any of her birthdays, and worked hard to create a life of comfort for Camino and Tía Solana. Although he was quick to discourage her dream to come to New York, he also sacrificed the happiness of his marriage to Yahaira’s mother in refusing to abandon Camino. This system of contradictions that existed inside of Papi reveal his virtues and his vices.
Where Papi’s true nature is a puzzle, El Cero is unequivocally the villain of Clap When You Land. However, El Cero’s dualistic nature works similarly to Papi’s: His outright villainy is contrasted with the deep sorrow over having lost his sister. Still, El Cero is set off from the hustlers of survival, like Papi and Don Mateo, because he represents the true danger that a place like the Dominican Republic poses to Camino. His antagonism escalates all the way to the novel’s climactic end, when Yahaira and Camino are forced to drive off his attempted sexual assault together. In this sense, El Cero works like a clock for Camino, counting down the liminal period in her life between childhood and adulthood. Like the mud in the novel’s first poem, he is a natural feature of the environment and yet corrosive.
Balancing against the male figures in Yahaira and Camino’s lives, Mami and Tía Solana represent strength and compassion, serving as mentors on the sisters’ respective journeys. While Tía Solana is stalwart and actively expresses her agency as a healer for Camino’s community, Mami’s agency is not revealed until later in the narrative. When Mami makes her archetypal return to the Dominican Republic, her valor and willfulness are revealed. When she drives El Cero away, Mami becomes the role model both sisters have been searching for. Similarly, Camino models her identity after Tía Solana, striving to become a doctor and developing her empathy for those around her. As Yahaira and Camino approach womanhood, they are looking at ways of knowing and building themselves.
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By Elizabeth Acevedo
