56 pages • 1 hour read
Neal Shusterman, Eric ElfmanTesla's Attic
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2014A 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
Asteroid Felicity Bonk
When held aloft to catch a ball during a game, Danny’s baseball glove attracts meteors. Size doesn’t matter, and the glove alters the orbit of a giant asteroid—called Felicity Bonk for the teenage girl who paid $10 for the right to name it—that heads directly for Earth. Nick gets his dad to take a swing with a Tesla bat, which sends out a shock wave that diverts the asteroid and saves the world. The asteroid is the main threat during the final third of the book, temporarily eclipsing the dangers posed by the Accelerati. It’s an ultimate challenge, which Nick meets successfully by staying cool-headed and thinking creatively.
Attic
At the top of the old Victorian house where Nick and his family move is an attic filled with old junk. Nick sells the junk and converts the space into his bedroom. The ceiling is pyramid-shaped with tall windows at the top point; the floor’s center is a space of warmth and comfort that draws dirty clothes, furniture, and Nick himself toward it. The sold junk turns out mostly to be a collection of ingenious, oddball inventions by Nikola Tesla. Many of the attic’s attributes remain mysterious throughout the story. It’s a place of strangeness filled with potential, not unlike the minds of the story’s characters. Uncertainty about the devices’ ultimate purposes echoes the uncertainties about how the kids will turn out.
House
Old and in need of repair, the large Victorian house in Colorado Springs where Nick and his family move was deeded to them by Nick’s great aunt. Its most interesting part is the attic, where Nick finds the strange devices that change his life. The oversized, shabby, oddball house represents the sad straits into which Nick Slate and his family are thrown after a fire burns down their previous house and kills Mrs Slate. With its frumpy exterior hiding a strange collection of remarkable Tesla inventions, the house also symbolizes the awkwardness of adolescence and the slow discovery of the characters’ hidden strengths.
Pin
Caitlin finds a jeweled pin dropped by a member of the mysterious investigators who show up at the site of the meteor strikes. The pin is made of gold and embossed with the letter A, its crosspiece a sideways figure 8—the sign for infinity—and Nick and Caitlin soon learn that the pin is the insignia of a secret society, the Accelerati:
History is filled with a sordid assortment of secret societies, each dedicated to either the betterment or the destruction of humanity. Regardless of their aim, however, all secret societies have one thing in common. They all have a stupid pin. Or a stupid hat. Or a ridiculously stupid handshake (135).
Though it might seem a silly affectation, dire consequences soon follow every time the pin appears. The pin symbolizes, and points the kids toward, the enemy they must defeat.
Tesla Devices
The strange items in the attic each have an extraordinary power. The tall lamp draws people to it and makes attractive whatever it illuminates. An electric fan with hexagonal blades causes freezing temperatures. A wet-cell battery revives dead things and people. Three of the devices—the tape recorder, the Shut Up ‘n Listen, and the box camera—reveal hidden truths and/or predict the future; these prove to be the machines most helpful to the kids as they navigate the dangers surrounding both the inventions and the Accelerati who crave them. All the devices are designed to fit together into a large assembly whose purpose remains unknown. They also form the source of the chief conflict in the book, with both Nick’s group and the Accelerati vying for control over them.
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