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Summary
Chapters 1-2
Chapter 1
16-year-old Maren Yearly reflects upon an experience from her infancy. Penny Wilson, a kind young woman living in the same apartment building as Maren and her mother, volunteers to babysit Maren. When Maren’s mother, Janelle, returns home, she encounters a gory scene: Penny has been savagely killed, and Maren sits in a pile of blood, chewing on Penny’s eardrum.
In the present, Janelle takes Maren out for her 16th birthday. Together, they go to a bookstore, dine at a fancy Italian restaurant, and catch a showing of Titanic in a movie theater. The next morning, Maren immediately notices that her mother is not at home. Several of Janelle’s possessions are missing, and Maren finds a note from Janelle, telling her that she loves her but “can’t do this anymore.” Maren is distraught, wondering whether her mother ever truly loved her, but she understands Janelle’s decision.
Maren explains that she is an “eater”–a human who suffers from an uncontrollable desire to eat human flesh. After Janelle returned home and found the dead body of Penny Wilson, she at first assumed that a cult had murdered the babysitter. However, later incidents in Maren’s life confirmed that she herself was responsible for Penny’s death. When she was eight years old, Maren attended a summer camp. One day, she swam far into the lake and met a boy who had swum from the boys’ camp on the other side of the lake. The boy, named Luke Vanderwall, sneaks into the girls’ camp to leave notes and small gifts for Maren. One day, he asks her to meet him in the woods at night. When Maren arrives, she finds that Luke has set up a tent for them both, full of games, storybooks, and snacks. Though she enjoys Luke’s company, she feels a sense of danger and wants to leave. Luke convinces her to stay a bit longer, and eventually, she leans in to kiss him.
Though the event is not depicted directly in the novel, Maren suggests that she cannibalized Luke that night. Afterwards, she is horrified by her own actions, and runs back to her cabin and pretends to have been asleep through the evening. The next morning, the camp counselors are on high alert after Luke is reported missing. News vans have arrived, and other campers spread rumors that Luke’s tent was discovered in the woods, covered in blood. When Janelle arrives to pick up Maren, she remembers the death of Penny Wilson, and intuits that Maren was involved in Luke’s disappearance. After Maren confirms that she killed Luke, Janelle quickly rushes them home, packs up their things, and moves to a new city. This is the first of many times that Janelle must uproot their lives in order to protect Maren, who kills several other children during her school years.
Chapter 2
In addition to the brief note, Janelle leaves behind some money and Maren’s birth certificate. Previously, Janelle refused to give Maren any information about her estranged father, but she sees his name listed in her birth -certificate: Francis Yearly of Sandhorn Minnesota. Janelle, Maren realizes, intends for her to use the money to go visit her father in Minnesota. However, Maren is determined to “make right” with her mother first. Despite Janelle’s secrecy regarding Maren’s family, Maren remembers the address of her maternal grandparents, which she saw once on a Christmas card that she found in the trash. She buys a bus ticket to Edgartown, Pennsylvania in order to confront her mother and grandparents. When she arrives in Edgartown, however, she spies on her family through a window and sees her grandparents comforting Janelle as she cries. Aware of the toll that her cannibalism has taken on Janelle, Maren decides to leave her mother alone, and she resolves to find her father in Minnesota.
This chapter alternates between the past and present. Years earlier, Maren begins to suffer from regular nightmares involving Luke after his murder. She isn’t sure if there are other “eaters” in the world, and she avidly reads fairy tales and folktales hoping to find examples of people like her. In these stories, she notes, only monsters eat humans. She begins to keep a notebook in which she documents various examples of cannibalism in mythology and literature. A boy at school tells her about black-widow spiders, which practice “sexual cannibalism,” in which the female spider consumes the male while mating. While the girls at her school instinctively avoid her, Maren befriends boys who are also social “outcasts.” Often, these boys develop an attraction to Maren and invite her to their homes, with fatal consequences.
Shortly after the death of Luke, Janelle gets a well-paid job in a law-office in Baltimore, Maryland. Hoping to build a new life for herself and Maren, Janelle begs her daughter to avoid other children and to control her cannibalistic urges. Unable to trust Maren with a babysitter after what happened to Penny, Janelle takes Maren with her to a company Christmas party at the home of a colleague. There, Maren meets Jamie, the host’s son, who is close to Maren in age. In the basement, Jamie exposes himself to Maren, and then requests that she do the same. Though she attempts to resist her own violent urges, she kills and cannibalizes Jamie, hiding his bloody clothes behind the washing machine. When Jamie’s parents begin to search for him, Janelle realizes what Maren has done, and she rushes home to pack and move yet again. Similar incidents continue to disrupt their lives throughout her childhood, as Maren consumes at least six other boys in a similar manner.
Analysis
The opening chapters of Bones and All introduce the novel’s protagonist, Maren, and her long-suffering mother, Janelle. Maren’s cannibalistic urges frequently uproot their lives, forcing Janelle to leave jobs, friends, and family behind in order to shield her daughter. Their strained relationship is central to these first two chapters. Though Janelle makes great personal sacrifices to protect Maren, she is nevertheless horrified by her actions and expresses little warmth or affection for her daughter. Maren notes, for example, that Janelle never uses comforting pet names for her, and she similarly refuses to sugar-coat the difficulties of their situation, nor Maren’s responsibility for those difficulties. When she believes that Maren is old enough to take care of herself, Janelle plans one final happy day together before abandoning her. She leaves Maren a brief note, her birth certificate, and an envelope of money, suggesting that she still feels some sense of responsibility for Maren’s well-being. However, Janelle leaves Maren without any contact information, implying that she desires a clean break from her daughter and a new life without her.
Ultimately, Maren feels that Janelle protects her out of obligation and duty rather than love. It is only after Janelle abandons her that Maren fully appreciates the depth of her mother’s suffering and the toll that raising a cannibalistic child has taken on her. Living on the run like a fugitive, Janelle has had no opportunity to develop a career, a social life, or any lasting relationships with others. When Maren spies on her mother at the home of her grandparents in Pennsylvania, she feels that she has no right to continue to disrupt her mother’s life and resolves to leave her alone. Though Janelle frequently appears in flashbacks throughout the course of the novel, she only appears directly in these first two chapters.
Janelle’s staunch refusal to answer Maren’s questions about her background, including the identity of her estranged father, forces Maren to take a long, difficult journey across the country to seek answers to her many lingering questions. There are also some hints in these early chapters that Janelle knows more about her daughter’s condition than she lets on. When Luke goes missing at summer camp, Janelle immediately suspects that Maren was involved, even though she has never previously attacked another child. Though horrified by Maren’s actions, she is less surprised by them than might be expected. Further, her decision to shield Maren from the law, which ultimately leads to the brutal deaths of no fewer than six other children, raises thorny moral questions.
Chapters 1 and 2 also introduce and explain the nature of Maren’s condition. Ordinarily, a “cannibal” is a person who decides, out of necessity, custom, or preference, to consume human flesh. Rather than using the word “cannibal,” however, Maren describes herself as an “eater,” which marks a subtle distinction. Maren describes her hunger for human flesh as a desire that is entirely beyond her control, a compulsion rather than a conscious choice. These impulses begin during her infancy, before she is old enough to understand her actions, nor their terrible consequences. Before the impulse to eat another person begins, she senses danger, but is unable to change her course of action. The actual act of eating another person is never described in Maren’s narrative, suggesting that she is barely conscious while possessed by this cannibalistic impulse, and afterwards she experiences terror and guilt.
