57 pages • 1 hour read
Angie KimMiracle Creek
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPrologue-Part 1, Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “A Year Later—The Trial: Day One”
Prologue Summary: “The Incident”
Young describes the events leading up to the fire. Her husband, Pak, left her in charge of his business, even though she was neither certified not qualified to be there, while he runs a quick errand and tells her not to tell anyone. Young is nervous, as there are four patients being treated, accompanied by two caregivers; Pak calls to tell her the protestors have returned, and she will need “to turn off the oxygen when the session ends” (6). However, the DVD one of the patients is watching has ended, and TJ begins beating his head off the wall of the chamber. The DVD player needs new batteries, and Young runs home to find them.
At home, Young calls for Mary but she is not there. Pak calls again, but Young does not tell him she has left the chamber. She finds the batteries and races back to the chamber just as it explodes; her daughter, seemingly on her way to the house, “flings up like a rag doll and arcs through the air. Gracefully. Delicately. Just before she lands on the ground with a soft thud, [Young] sees her ponytail, bouncing high. The way it used to when she was a little girl, jumping rope” (10).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Young Yoo”
A year after the explosion, Young attends Elizabeth’s trial. However, Young feels that she and Pak were the ones who should have been charged, despite Pak’s insistence that he could not have stopped the fire even if he was there with Young. Elizabeth stands accused of orchestrating the fire to get rid of Henry, who suffered from a variety of issues, even though Henry seemed much healthier than the other patients. Young notes that, in the courtroom, Elizabeth seems “serene. Almost happy” (18). Young wonders if the newspapers are right, and Elizabeth is “a monster” who was “desperate to get rid of her son” (18).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Matt Thompson”
Matt is a doctor, and the prosecutor has him testify first to explain to the jury what HBOT is and what it treats. Matt is married to a Korean woman whose father is an acupuncturist, and met Pak and Young through his father-in-law. Matt doesn’t believe that the hyperbaric chamber can cure infertility. Matt is humiliated by his wife’s disclosure to her parents, Pak, and Young that he suffers from infertility; he is even more humiliated by having to testify about it in court. Matt only agreed to try to the treatment because his wife insisted; he was one of a few patients known as “‘double-dive’ patients” doing two sessions a day for a total of 40 sessions (26). There were three other double-dive patients; Matt saw them and their parents at almost every session: Henry and Elizabeth, TJ and Kitt, and Rosa and Teresa.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 2 Analysis
This section provides much of the exposition of the plot, mainly through Matt’s testimony. The reader functions much as the jury does, hearing the evidence and trying to understand what has happened. However, the reader has more information than the jury. For example, the reader knows that both Pak and Young are lying about their whereabouts during the explosion, and that Matt is hiding information about Mary. Matt resents having to testify in the courtroom; he “did not want to see anyone from Miracle Submarine, not the other patients, not Elizabeth, and definitely, most certainly, not Mary Yoo” (21). This emphasis draws the reader’s attention. Details about the fire, the characters, and their actions before and after the fire are revealed in small doses, and the reader must piece together what each character knows to get to the truth. In this way, Kim creates suspense, and despite the book starting with Elizabeth in custody, the reader almost immediately questions whether Elizabeth is the culprit.
This slow doling out of information also complicates everything that the district attorney believes is clear: who started the fire and why. The characters all have something to hide, and the reader is unsure which, if any, of these characters are reliable narrators. However, Kim provides a clue: Unlike every other chapter, the Prologue—in which Young narrates what happened to her in the time leading up to the fire—is the only one that is in first person; all other chapters, though told through the viewpoint of a single character, use the third-person limited point of view, that is, told from the perspective of one character. By beginning the story overall with Young’s voice, Kim signals that Young is a trustworthy narrator.
Furthermore, Young not only seems guilt-ridden and saddened by what has happened, but she has always wanted to tell the truth about her whereabouts that night. Her husband, however, has insisted that she lie, telling her “every day—their absence from the barn that night didn’t cause the fire, and he couldn’t have prevented the explosion even if he’d stayed with the patients […]” (14). Young us unsure if Pak is correct, but she obeys her husband.
