54 pages • 1 hour read
Kristen PerrinHow to Solve Your Own Murder
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Birds
Part of the fortune Frances fears says to “Beware the bird, for it will betray you” (3). This reference is to a motif in the novel which seems to refer to anything having to do with Frances’s friend with a bird name, Emily Sparrow, but in fact expands to refer to anyone who betrays Frances. Emily does indeed betray Frances by sleeping with and getting pregnant by John, Frances’s boyfriend. The betrayal goes deeper, however, as Emily’s disappearance takes over Frances’s life and destroys her happiness, showing the bird reference to be even more insidious than Frances suspected.
Emily buys the three friends bird charm necklaces, and these add to the motif. Rose throws hers away in disgust just before she kills Emily. Frances, however, is playing with the necklace over a year later when she makes the decision to dedicate her life to finding Emily’s killer and feels her goodness slipping away. The bird charm she refuses to stop wearing shows Emily’s continuing negative influence over her. While birds are often associated with freedom, anyone associated with the motif is less than free. Perrin additionally uses the motif to give away Emily’s killer in Chapter 13 when it is Rose, not Emily who is described as a frightening bird (116). This singular crossing of the motifs suggests Rose may be guilty of the crime.
Roses
With her motif of roses, Perrin associates the names of characters with objects to give clues to the solution of the crime and add deeper meaning to the motif, which appears frequently over the course of the novel. There are two murderers in the story, and the second, Joe, acts in a way that unintentionally exposes the identity of the first, his mother, through the use of this motif. When Joe Leroy begins his plan to kill Frances, he sends white roses. Annie suspects they have something to do with Frances’s death despite what the autopsy shows, planting the idea that roses are deadly, though it is uncertain how until the end.
In using this particular flower as the impetus for the murder Joe reveals his mother Rose’s true nature, which she hides through most of the novel. Her obsession with and extreme hurt by Frances is known only to her son. Flowers are symbols of passion and desire, and the color white is usually associated with both friendship and death. The white roses delivered by Joe are correct in every instance as they describe his mother’s deadly obsessive friendship for Frances.
Unlike the motif of the bird that provides a spoiler, the motif of the roses provides a red herring to balance out the clue of the white roses with the needles. Annie notes that the roses are grown at Archie Foyle’s farm, and when they are discovered right next to a field of marijuana, the roses briefly appear to point to the Foyles.
Journals and Writing
The motif of journals and writing is one that links the protagonists and the narrative’s timelines. Annie Adams writes in her journal as a way of processing the world around her, making charts and thinking through suspects and clues on paper. When she discovers her Great Aunt Frances’s journals, it is like finding someone who speaks the same language, as Frances uses her journals and writing in much the same way as Annie. She could be speaking for Annie when she writes in her first journal entry:
I’m writing this all here because I just know there will be things I’ve seen that might matter further down the road. Some details that seem small now will turn out to be extremely important or the other way around. So I’m keeping everything together, and I’m making careful notes (15).
Because her writing is so personal and tracks her thoughts, the attack on Annie’s journals feels particularly ominous. Someone has seen her ideas and found them threatening enough to destroy. On the other hand, when Annie discovers Frances’s empty journals, she feels like they are a gift from someone who understands Annie’s need to write down the world around her in order to understand it. It also implies there will be further adventures for Annie, as each empty notebook could be a different episode waiting to be written. The final words “putting pen to blank paper, I started writing” implies that the narrative of How To Solve Your Own Murder is actually the story that fills the first notebook, creating a frame story structure and bringing the characters and the plot full circle through the motif of journals and writing (353).
