55 pages • 1 hour read
Rick RiordanDaughter of the Deep
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2021A 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 52-57Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 52 Summary
Power is down on the Nautilus when Dev speaks over the loudspeaker, ordering Ana’s crew to stand down. Nelinha uses coal, the backup power source, to restore power, and they fire a torpedo at an oncoming boarding ship. Ana is disappointed that Romeo does not appear to be nearby, but she is not surprised. She thinks, “I knew I was playing with things I didn’t understand” (286). Then, the Aronnax almost destroys the Nautilus with torpedoes, Dev refuses to step down, and the Nautilus is unable to restore her shields.
Chapter 53 Summary
The Nautilus performs an emergency dive to avoid the torpedoes, but they are caught in the shock wave and Ana blacks out. When she wakes up, she overhears Dev on the com sounding annoyed that he was put in danger. This bothers Ana, and she thinks, “my mouth tastes like the bottom of a barbecue pit. Dev isn’t worried about me or any of the other lives on the Nautilus. He really is someone I don’t know” (291). While Ana and her crew wait, Romeo finally appears, and he embraces the Aronnax. The Aronnax is unable to remove Romeo, and so Ana sends Ester and the other Orcas to save the LI students. A boarding skiff with Dev aboard, however, escapes towards Lincoln Base, and Ana follows with Gem.
Chapter 54 Summary
Ana and Gem speed off to rescue their friends on the base. Ana also remembers that Gem knows a lot about her brother too. She recalls, “Dev was Gem’s house captain. Over the last two years, they’ve probably spent more time together than Dev and I have” (296). When they pass through the tunnel, they are forced to emergency eject from their diving suits in order to avoid Dev’s weapons. Gem shoots the LI skiff, sinking it, and then the LI students dive in after Gem and Ana.
Chapter 55 Summary
Gem and Ana fight hand-to-hand underwater with the LI students even though “underwater hand-to-hand combat is the worst” (299). Socrates enters with his dolphin friends to rescue Ana and Gem. Gem must tend to Ana’s wounds, but first, they head to the base.
Chapter 56 Summary
Upon entering the base, Ana and Gem find it empty. The LI students have removed everything important and loaded it onto the Varuna to take away. Ana explains to Gem that the LI students have “stripped all the information and tech they can from the base. With the Aronnax gone, the Varuna is their only way out” (305). They are still holding Ophelia, Luca, Franklin, and Tia as hostages. Ana gets the base pilot bugs to bring EMP grenades through the ducts into the dining room where the hostages are held.
Chapter 57 Summary
Ana pretends to surrender as a distraction, and the LI students let her and Gem into the dining room. The pilot bugs bring in the grenades, stunning the LI students and allowing Ana and Gem to rescue their friends. They update their friends with “the brief version: The Aronnax has been destroyed, the Nautilus is banged up but okay, and the base has been cleared (for now)” (310). Then, Gem and Ana leave to find the Varuna.
Chapters 52-57 Analysis
Within these chapters, close to the end of the novel, Ana embraces her captaincy and opposes her brother. While fighting the Aronnax, Ana remains level-headed and successfully leads the Nautilus’s defense. She even gets on the com and announces to the Aronnax, “This is Captain Ana Dakkar of the Nautilus. Stand down or you will be destroyed” (287). She fully embraces being captain at this point, using her title to order the LI students to stop attacking or risk their own destruction. This is not the announcement of a fearful or reticent leader, but a confident one. Dev is not pleased with this, however. At first, he does not even take Ana seriously. He says, “nice try, sis,” as if Ana could never come close to truly opposing him (288). When Ana does fight back, she overhears Dev yelling at one of his crew for shooting at the Nautilus, mad not that Ana could have been hurt but that he could have been. Here, he has revealed his true nature to Ana: Rather than the devoted and caring brother she knew, Ana has a selfish, cruel, and dangerous one instead. Ana now supplants Dev as the better heir to Nemo’s legacy because she both takes command of the Nautilus and improves upon Nemo’s handling of the sub. Dev would never have been able to command like Ana has, with empathy and deliberation.
In this section, Ana continues to work increasingly well with Gem. The two leave the Nautilus together in order to rescue Luca, Ophelia, Tia, Franklin, and Hewett on Lincoln Base, and when Ana is hurt, Gem tends to her wounds so that they can keep going. The two work seamlessly together, despite any previous awkwardness or hostility due to Gem and Nelinha’s strained relationship. They even pull off a plan to trick the LI students into giving up their friends. As they leave their friends to head for the Varuna, Ana and Gem give some of their weapons to Ophelia, Luca, Tia, and Franklin. Ana thinks, “this leaves me with just my dive knife and Gem with his SIG Sauers, but that will have to do” (311). Without fancy weapons, Ana and Gem will have to rely on each other and their basic fighting skills in order to defeat Dev, one of the last from the Aronnax still even able to try and escape.
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