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PART TWO: Vermont
Summary: Chapter 16
Cadence tells the reader a tale of an aging king who tested his three daughters to see which one loved him best. The youngest daughter angered him with her response and is banished but eventually returns and wins back his affection. Realizing he is losing his mind, she pledges to stay and care for him—whether out of love or a desire to keep her inheritance, the daughter is not sure.
Summary: Chapter 17
Cadence begins getting rid of personal possessions, including a copy of King Lear, which she read in school. She mails a couple of items to her cousins.
Summary: Chapter 18
Cadence continues struggling to remember more of her accident. She used to ask her mother about it, but Penny would cry, telling Cadence that she had asked these questions many times. Cadence was always upset by the answers, Penny explained, but never remembered them. Finally, Cadence wrote the answers down. This is why she can now give at least some of the details.
Summary: Chapter 19
Cadence’s father makes plans to take her to Europe again in summer seventeen, but she insists on returning to the island. The next day, a visibly failing Granddad comes to visit. Speaking with Cadence but failing to recognize her, he refers to her in the third person as the “future of the family.” Realizing his mistake, he pulls flowers from a nearby flowerbed in a gesture of apology.
Summary: Chapter 20
Cadence tells the reader another story, of a king who stubbornly sent one daughter after another to plead with a dragon. The dragon simply ate all three. Cadence wonders whether the dragon or the father killed the girls. Penny and Cadence’s father quarrel but eventually agree that Cadence will spend the first month of summer seventeen on the island and the rest with him in Colorado.
Summary: Chapter 21
Cadence gives away more possessions and plans to give Gat back a jacket she had borrowed.
Summary: Chapter 22
Cadence learns from a phone conversation with Taft that Bonnie thinks Cadence is a drug addict. Taft is afraid the homes on the island are haunted.
Analysis
Cadence’s first fairytale symbolizes the way that Harris manipulates his daughter’s love and reminds the reader that such family dynamics have been at work for generations. The description of the man as a king and his daughters as princesses also remind the reader of the Sinclairs’ wealth and status. However, the analogy fails as regards the youngest daughter wandering in poverty, because of the lavish lifestyle in which all of Harris’s daughters engage. Cadence interprets her own fairytale to say that the daughter questions her decision to return since she is then stuck with a tyrant. The reader is left wondering who the daughter might be and how the tale is relevant, not to the aunts and Harris, but to Cadence herself.
As Cadence begins to divest herself of her possessions, a project to which she devotes herself each day like penance, she compares her behavior with that of her mother. Cadence claims not to have any use for beauty, but her descriptions of Gat almost always linger on his physical appearance. While she despises her mother for collecting objects that have no use, she pretends as though a bed pillow or a book were useless objects. Cadence accurately realizes that her mother collects such objects because of the status they confer on her. Such objects help Penny hold her head high in her community despite the fact that her husband has left her. Cadence doesn’t see the value in learning how to spurn pity, as she continues to wallow in her own pain and self-absorption. Granted, Penny is not self-sufficient, but she seems significantly ahead of her daughter Cadence in terms of her ability to process her own traumas.
At the same time, Cadence starts collecting memories, almost as if she’s had to rid herself of possessions in order to fill herself with thoughts. These are fragmented, some of which she has narrated in full in previous chapters, leading the reader to believe that she will fill in the gaps in later chapters. However, she also says that her mother wrote down the answers to her questions and she refers to those as she narrates, leaving the reader wondering why she hasn’t simply told us the entire story. In this way, Cadence succeeds in frustrating the reader, ultimately feeling something similar to her.
The next fairytale Cadence tells is about a king who sends all of his daughters to defeat a dragon, again clearly implicating Harris. But again, Cadence fails to extend her interpretation of the fairytale. In particular, she neglects the role that Harris plays in helping Cadence manipulate her parents. Harris is old, in failing health, and suffering from memory decline. But when he visits Penny and Cadence, he exerts himself, nevertheless. The chapters are juxtaposed so that Harris comes to visit Penny, Cadence tells a fairytale about a manipulative old king, and Penny capitulates to Cadence’s desires. These point to Harris’s influence over Penny in favor of Cadence. Harris might be sending his daughter to be killed by a dragon, but Cadence might be the dragon.
In Chapters 21 and 22, Cadence must confront her idealized memories of Beechwood Island and the Liars when faced with her smaller cousins’ experience of it. She tries to convince the reader and likely herself that she no longer loves Gat, but she is unconvincing. Like the start of the novel with its verse portions, the repetition of certain details highlights their falseness. The conflict is compounded when her cousin Taft calls, asks whether she is a drug addict and tells her the island is haunted. His call is a wake up, a reminder to both her and the reader that Beechwood Island is not the idyllic place she wants it to be, but instead a place where the Sinclairs continue to be deeply flawed. They can’t leave their problems behind because they are the problem.
