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64 pages 2 hours read

Daniel José Older

Shadowshaper

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015

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Chapters 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary

After Robbie disappears, Sierra uses the chalk to draw three eyes and puts spirits into them, instructing them to find Robbie. The eyes lead her into the forest. Sierra hears humming around her, a chorus of voices “in rising and falling harmonies that filled the night” (142). Sierra soon realizes that she can see easier in the dark and that she can jump and soar in the air until she’s ready to come down. The humming continues around her, and she notices several shadows running alongside her. Realizing that Robbie will be waiting for her, Sierra runs her chalk along the trees and gathers the strength of several spirits, turning them into green shards that follow her to the meadow where Robbie is waiting. Robbie sends a red tide Sierra’s way, but she hurdles past him. Sierra draws more eyes and sends them and the shards after Robbie. He gives up, impressed by how quickly she picked up the skill. Sierra isn’t quite sure what happened, but she wants to do it again.

Chapter 22 Summary

Sierra dreams of being surrounded by spirits, all of them feeling lifelike as they whisper their stories to her. A voice in Sierra’s mind urges her awake. She remembers everything that happened the night before and determines to solve the riddle of Lucera’s whereabouts so she can stop Wick. Downstairs, Sierra hears Tía Rosa cackling, and the sound disturbs the upstairs tenant, Timothy. In the kitchen, Sierra confronts María about the shadowshapers and what she’s been hiding. Rosa claims that Grandpa Lázaro is crazy and has always been babbling about spirits, making himself “the shame of the family” (150) who “almost got himself put away because he wouldn’t shut up about it” (151). Sierra snaps at Rosa after she brings up Robbie’s skin color again: “You ever look in the mirror, Tía?” (151). She reminds Rosa that they also aren’t white and reprimands María and Rosa for being ashamed of their heritage before storming out of the house.

Chapter 23 Summary

Sierra calls Nydia and tells her that she a shadow creature chased her. She asks Nydia if she’s heard of the Sorrows, and Nydia tells her what little there is to know: “Supposedly they haunt some ol’ broken-down church uptown by the river” (154). Nydia offers to do some more research. Sierra is surprised to find the junkyard locked, but she lets herself in with her key. Sierra sees that Robbie has continued working on his mural. Her own dragon is almost finished, and Sierra reflects how much more her art means to her now that she has these powers. Sierra gets lost in work until Izzy and Tee interrupt her, inviting her to join them at a coffee shop. On the way there, Sierra invites them to see Juan’s band that night. They arrive at the coffee shop, where Sierra is reluctant to go in because it looks too gentrified, but Izzy and Tee urge her in.

Chapter 24 Summary

In the coffee shop, Izzy and Tee admire the “hipster” drinks, but Sierra complains about her iced tea; Tee reminds her, “It’s three dollars and twenty-five cents’ worth of brown water […] So you better enjoy it” (159). Sierra continues to think about the riddle of finding Lucera, asking her friends for help. Big Jerome and Bennie join them. Sierra asks if her friends know what their ancestry is, and Izzy gives Jerome a hard time when he assumes Tee is Haitian because of her French name: “There’s other French-speaking islands in the Caribbean, you know” (162). The conversation draws attention from the white people around them. Jerome points out that Manny’s paper, Searchlight, didn’t come out today, which is strange since Manny hasn’t missed a day since 1973. Sierra worries about this since Manny wasn’t at the junk lot. She and her friends decide to check on him. 

Chapters 21-24 Analysis

The importance of family heritage continues in this section, where Sierra encounters two very different responses to people and the way they treat their ancestry. In Chapter 22, Sierra grows frustrated when María continues to refuse to talk about shadowshaping, and Tía Rosa once again gives Sierra a hard time about “that Negrito you’re dating” (151). Sierra snaps at both, chiding Rosa first for her “stupid neighborhood gossip” and “opinions about everyone […] and how dark they are or how kinky their hair is” (151). Sierra reminds Rosa that they also have non-white ancestry, a fact which Rosa tries to suppress by pointing out how much darker others are. Rosa has succumbed to a self-loathing that can sometimes be found in non-white cultures that value white and light skin over darker skin; since white people were at one time seen as the dominant or superior culture, those with mixed ancestry sometimes shun anything that marks them as being non-white. Sierra refuses to give into this way of thinking, insisting that she loves her features that mark her as being non-white: “I love my hair. I love my skin” (152). She challenges Rosa to stop running from her own ethnicity.

María’s internalized racism is less obvious, but still present, and Sierra also challenges her mother to rethink her ideas. By refusing to talk about or acknowledge her family’s ties to shadowshaping, María shows that she is just as ashamed of her family’s ethnic roots. Grandpa Lázaro was considered crazy for talking about shadowshaping, but Lázaro is simply carrying on his cultural traditions from Puerto Rico. As Sierra has learned, many others in the community—including Papa Acevado and Manny—also practiced shadowshaping. It is safe to assume that those who considered Lázaro to be crazy were either white or those, like María and Rosa, who have shunned their non-white ancestry to try to fit in with American culture. Sierra urges her mother to stop being afraid what people might think of her: “What are you running from?” (152). Rather than ignore or suppress the past, as María has done, Sierra realizes she wants to fully embrace “this wild family legacy she was only beginning to understand” (155).

Others from Sierra’s age group seem more open to accept their cultural heritage. In the coffee shop, conversing with her friends, Sierra learns that each has a complicated background. Tee comes from Martinique, France, and Nigeria, “from the Igbo people” (162). When Jerome assumes, simplistically, that Sierra must be Spanish, the others correct him that her cultural makeup is more complicated than that: “I doubt her African and Taíno ancestors feel like it’s ‘whatever’” (163). Similarly, in earlier chapters, Robbie showed off his tattoos that paid tributes to his ancestors. The acceptance shown by Sierra’s age group may reflect a few important shifts. In Sierra’s family, her grandfather has remained close to the traditions of his culture because he emigrated from Puerto Rico and brought these traditions to the United States. Sierra’s mother and aunt, by contrast, have both tried to distance themselves from their cultural backgrounds as much as possible; children of immigrants, or second-generation Americans, often feel pressured to assimilate to the new culture and forget the ways of the past. Third-generation Americans like Sierra—who were born in the United States—often don’t feel as much pressure to conform to American traditions and standards and thus feel more freedom to reconnect with their ancestry and traditions. In addition, Sierra’s generation has been more encouraged to celebrate their diversity and differences than María’s likely would have been.

Sierra’s generation is also more well-versed and practiced in noticing and calling out cultural appropriation when a dominant culture adopts and benefits from cultural traditions and staples of a minority culture. Sierra has already noticed the gentrification of her neighborhood and how people of color are slowly being pushed out; Tee further identifies the issue of Wick stealing from the shadowshapers. She points out the hypocrisy of Wick being able to study Lázaro’s culture and write books about it when she would be considered absurd for doing the same thing: “I don’t see why I can’t write a book about his people. Imma call it Hipster vs. Yuppie: A Culturalpological Study” (161). Though Tee is joking, she points out one of the issues of anthropology, in which white people often study a minority culture, often to highlight its so-called “strangeness.” White culture, as Tee points out, also has its fair share of bizarreness, though no one would consider it an anthropological study if she immersed herself in the culture and wrote a study about that.

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