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.
Themes
The Importance of Friends and Found Family
Although one family, the Dakkars, takes a central role in the plot of Daughter of the Deep, a more vital support system for Ana Dakkar is her found family at school. Ana has to rely on her friends more than she anticipated because her brother and only surviving family member, Dev, turns out to be a traitor. Thus, the core of Ana’s found family consists of her friends Ester and Nelinha, and later, their fellow student Gem. These four together represent each of the student houses at Harding-Pencroft Academy. Although students in each house have different specialties and sometimes there is inter-house conflict, these four work together throughout the novel, backing each other up and supporting each other like a family.
Ana, Ester, and Nelinha are close from the start. Before HP Academy is destroyed, the three are roommates. Even though the three are from different houses, Ana is glad they get to room together. She thinks, “thankfully, rooms aren’t assigned by house, or I would never feel like I could be off duty and relax with my besties” (12). Ana might get along well with the other members of her house, but if she can never truly relax with them, then they are not quite at the level of family. Later, when Ana gets her period and suffers her typically terrible period pains, Ester and Nelinha come to her rescue. Ana knows, “without my friends, I don’t know how I would have coped” (125). Like a family, Ana, Ester, and Nelinha are there for each other through sickness and health, thick and thin.
Gem is a more recent addition to Ana’s found family. Even though he and Ana are prefects and Ester and Nelinha are not, the four of them are regularly grouped together to represent the four houses because of their strengths. When Ana explains her brother’s death to Luca and Ophelia, she thinks, “Gem and Nelinha sit on either side of me. Ester, still quietly sniffling, sits on Nelinha’s right” (155). Like siblings, these four might not always get along, but they are there for each other throughout the tragedies and adventures. Even though Gem and Nelinha in particular do not always get along, Gem still tries to mend the rift. By the end of the novel, Gem is defending Ana, supporting her and her leadership. After Dev reveals his betrayal, Gem tells her, “you’re not your brother […] what he did doesn’t reflect on you” (245). This support warms Ana’s heart. Ana might have a complicated relationship with her family, both alive and deceased, but she will always have her found family there for her.
Coping with the Loss of One’s Parents
Just as Ana’s found family is an important theme in Daughter of the Deep, so too is the loss of her birth family. Riordan reveals this early on, such as when Ana thinks on the bus ride to her freshmen trials that Harding-Pencroft Academy is “the only home Dev and I have in the world” (17). After the loss of their parents two years prior to the start of the novel, the school has had to step in and care for them.
Throughout the novel, Ana deals extensively with the grief she feels due to the loss of her parents. After she sees her school crumble into the ocean, she thinks, “you might think the horror of losing my parents would have given me some coping strategies for dealing with this kind of tragedy. It hasn’t. If anything, it makes the stab to the chest even more painful” (39). For Ana, like for many people, grief and mourning are continual processes. Even though two years have passed since her parents’ deaths, the pain is no less difficult.
Ana suffers additional losses that compound her grief. For Ana, the additional deaths are even harder because it means that the circle of people who love and protect her is shrinking. Ana also recognizes that there is no way to cure grief, no tricks to getting rid of it, only learning to live alongside it. But she does learn how to live with her parents’ memory while looking toward the future. After the school’s destruction, Ana decides, “yesterday was about shock, uncertainty, fear. Our world was shattered. Today, we have to figure out how to reassemble ourselves from the broken pieces” (98). Tragedy is a shock to everyone’s system, and it is completely normal and expected for there to be a period of overwhelming emotion. After working through that, however, you need to rebuild yourself so you can move on, even if you are changed forever.
In addition to losing her parents, Ana symbolically loses Dev when he reveals himself to be a traitor. His apparent death sets up his separation from Ana later in the novel: After Ana discovers that her brother is alive but a traitor, she mourns the brother that she thought she had. Ana tells her fellow students, “what Dev did—I don’t even know the person who could do that to our school and our friends” (244). Finding out that Dev is alive is so bittersweet for Ana because her brother is alive, but he is not the person she believed him to be.
Privilege, Legacy, and Inheritance
Tied in with the theme of family is that of privilege, legacy, and inheritance. Ana’s legacy comes from three main sources—her parents, Dev and her ancestor, Prince Dakkar (Captain Nemo). When Ana first discovers that she is descended from Captain Nemo, she also realizes that her best friend Ester is descended from the Harding who knew Nemo. Ana thinks, “Ester and I were bound together centuries before we were born. It makes me wonder about reincarnation and karma, and whether our souls might have met at another time” (114). Her bond with Ester is a positive inheritance, something that makes Ana’s life easier and better. Much of the rest of her inheritance is not so good, however.
For most of Ana’s life, her brother, Dev, overshadowed her. When the HP freshmen arrive at Lincoln Base, Luca tells Ana that if they expected anyone to arrive, it would have been her brother. In response, Ana thinks, “I’m sure he doesn’t mean the words to hurt. They do anyway. I grew up in Dev’s shadow. Mostly I was okay with that. My parents were loving and accepting, but they had some very old-fashioned ideas about their firstborn son carrying on the family legacy. I was happy to let Dev be their Chosen One. It freed me to do whatever I wanted with my life—or so I thought” (152). Even though Ana did not previously know the true extent of her family’s legacy, she was well aware that it was supposed to belong to Dev. With him gone, she is forced to step up and take charge although that very fact of her leadership is a reminder that her brother is gone.
Ana meets her legacy head on when she first approaches the Nautilus. She thinks, “my whole life has led to this moment” (176). This legacy is thrust upon Ana, who never expected and was never expected to take it up. The responsibility is enormous, for it is built out of the lives of many. Despite how much Ana does not want this responsibility—she even thinks, “I hate my DNA” (218)—she does what is best for her friends and fellow students. By the end of the novel, Ana learns to appreciate her family’s legacy and her inheritance from Captain Nemo. Unlike Dev, she does not think of it as an entitlement; she sees it as a privilege and a responsibility. She realizes she must earn the Nautilus’s respect, whereas Dev believes he can demand what is rightfully his. Ana proves that someone with privilege can do good in the world by using their considerable resources to make it a better place.
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