As Brave As You

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

Brothers Genie and Ernie, 11 and 13 years old respectively, arrive in Virginia with their parents, who are dropping the boys off to spend a month with their dad’s parents. Their own parents are going to spend that time in Jamaica, resolving their marital problems. The boys’ dad hasn’t seen his own father in almost 10 years, an estrangement that Genie doesn’t understand. Genie has only met his father’s mother once when she visited the family in New York. Genie’s grandmother greets the family when they arrive late at night, and everyone goes to bed.

When he wakes up the next morning, Genie finds a toy fire truck in the guest bedroom that he later learns belonged to his deceased uncle Wood. When the family eats breakfast with Genie’s grandparents, Genie meets his grandfather, Brooke, and discovers that Brooke is blind.

Chapter 2 Summary

After breakfast, Genie indignantly asks his parents why they didn’t tell him about his grandfather’s blindness. His father tells him that Brooke refused to let him tell Genie and Ernie about it until they met him in person—his grandfather doesn’t like people to form preconceptions about him because he can’t see. Genie’s dad warns him to be careful with the toy truck, saying that it’s a treasured possession to Genie’s grandmother because of its association with Wood. The boys go outside; shortly afterwards, their parents leave to return to New York. Genie is uneasy about being left with his grandparents, despite his parents’ reassurances.

Chapter 3 Summary

Genie stays out in the yard with Ernie for a few moments, before going back inside. He finds his grandfather still at the table from breakfast, and they talk for a while. At first, Genie enjoys their conversation because his grandfather lets him ask as many questions as he wants, a welcome change from adults who usually get tired of his incessant inquisitiveness or don’t know the answers, forcing him to look them up online. Genie discovers that his grandfather carries a gun, and is both intrigued and made uneasy by the fact. By the time Genie screws up the courage to ask Brooke about it, his grandfather says that question time is over.

Chapter 4 Summary

Back outside, Genie and Ernie see a girl hammering something on the porch of a house down at the bottom of the hill below their grandparents’ house and decide to go down and see what she’s doing. Genie falls as he’s going down the hill, tumbling to the bottom, which attracts the girl’s attention and embarrasses him. The girl’s name is Tess, and she knows and is clearly affectionate toward the boys’ grandparents. She shows them what she was working on—flattening beer bottle caps to make earrings that she sells at a local market.

Tess takes Genie and Ernie next door to a small bar, where she and the bartender trick the boys into thinking that they’re being served beer. When they take a sip, they realize that it’s actually just ginger beer. After this friendly prank, the bartender welcomes them to the area. While they sit there, Genie can’t help looking at a special light that attracts and then electrocutes flies. Tess alludes to the fact that her father works at the bar. The boys hear their grandmother calling them from on top of the hill, and they say goodbye to Tess, trudging back up the slope to the house.

Chapters 1-4 Analysis

These first few chapters introduce most of the book’s characters and illustrate important dynamics between them that will drive the main conflicts.

Genie registers the tensions and unspoken hostilities between the adults around him with observant empathy. He sees his father’s coldness toward Brooke, which suggests that there is unresolved tension in their relationship. Genie is also aware of his parents’ marital difficulties. A perceptive, sensitive boy, Genie notices things like “the bags under his mother’s eyes” (21).

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The brothers’ age gap spans a tellingly wide gulf. Ernie’s role is to be the older, more “fearless” brother, whose interest in impressing Tess illustrates that he is well on his way to becoming a teenager with its accompanying hormonal urges. Genie, conversely, still occupies the space between childhood and adolescence. He has what he calls a “girlfriend” back in Brooklyn, but he views her as a companion or friend rather than as a romantic object. The established pattern between the two brothers is that Genie looks to Ernie and then imitates some of his actions. Aware of himself doing this, Genie uses the term “Pete and Repeat” to express mirroring as a way of calling attention to repeating patterns between people and in the natural world.

The book’s small-town Virginia setting draws a contrast between the boys’ urban home in Brooklyn and their grandparents’ house. There are many differences: In Virginia, Tess and the brothers are relatively unsupervised, there is a sense of history between the people Genie encounters, and even the dog’s presence affects Genie. For Genie, one important sensory difference is the lack of noise: “And to make it even weirder, it was crazy quiet! No police sirens, no loud music, no couples arguing outside his window on the street. No hungry cats, whose meows, for some reason, always sounded like babies crying” (20). This seeming peace belies the history of racial tension in the rural south and the fate of Uncle Wood.