46 pages • 1 hour read
Cherie DimalineThe Marrow Thieves
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Frenchie’s Coming-To Story”
Frenchie and his brother, Mitch, are hiding in a tree house, having found a bag of Doritos in an empty house. School truancy officers—“Recruiters, we called them” (2)—track Frenchie and Mitch. Mitch instructs Frenchie to climb out the window and hide in the tree. Frenchie does as Mitch tells him, and Mitch makes noise to attract the Recruiters to himself.
As Frenchie hides, he remembers hearing about the schools from his father, whom he has not seen in a long time. Frenchie’s family, like other Native families, decide to become nomadic, heading north to avoid the schools. Frenchie recalls, “I’d felt kind of special then, before I knew how dangerous special could be” (6). Frenchie’s recollections end noting that his family did not move north as planned, as his father never returned.
Once the Recruiters leave with Mitch, Frenchie gathers his backpack and goes on the run. He develops a cough and starts running out of supplies as he heads north. While running, Frenchie recalls the last time he saw his mother, before he and Mitch were on their own together. He realizes that there is “[n]o one to take care of me now. No one to make me move” (13). Convinced he is going to die, Frenchie goes to sleep. When Frenchie wakes up, he realizes that fellow Natives, led by Miig, have rescued him.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 introduces the post-apocalyptic landscape of the novel. Through hints and small asides, Dimaline paints a picture of a ravaged world where Natives are now targets—though the reason remains unspecified for the time being. Over the course of the chapter, Frenchie repeatedly experiences loss and rebirth through a mix of current events and flashbacks. One by one, Frenchie loses each of his family members—father, mother, and brother—and must find a way to push on without them until he eventually meets a new “family” that takes him in. This sets up the cycle of loss and rebirth that forms one of the major themes of the novel.
Part of the cyclical theme is the recurrence of whites and white culture attacking Natives. In a recalled moment, Frenchie’s father, Jean, refers to “the old residential school system they used to try to break our people to begin with” (5). In Canada, residential schools removed Native children from their parents’ care with the express purpose of preventing the children from participating in Native culture; the children were “assimilated” into white, Christian culture, often accompanied by physical and sexual abuse. By alluding to the residential schools, Dimaline quickly and clearly conveys the type of threat that Natives face in this post-apocalyptic Canada.
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By Cherie Dimaline
