38 pages • 1 hour read
The Field Guide
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Foreword-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary: “Letter from Holly Black”
Holly Black says that she and co-author Tony DiTerlizzi received a letter from Mallory Grace on behalf of Mallory and her siblings, Jared and Simon. The letter accompanies a photocopy of a page from a strange book that describes faeries as real. Mallory asks that Black and DiTerlizzi help the kids get the book to a publisher.
The authors reply and soon receive a package containing the book, followed by a visit from the three children. The authors become involved in the children’s story and believe it’s important: “There is an invisible world around us and we hope that you, dear reader, will open your eyes to it” (viii).
In her letter, titled “Letter from the Grace Kids,” Mallory Grace writes: “The book tells people how to identify faeries and how to protect themselves” (ix). The children will forward the book manually to the authors because regular mail is “too dangerous.” They want the world to know that what happened to them “could happen to anyone” (ix).
Chapter 1 Summary: “IN WHICH the Grace Children Get Acquainted with Their New Home”
To the Grace children, their new home, an old Victorian mansion, looks like a bunch of shacks piled atop one another. A few flecks of paint still remain on the rundown building. The entrance hall is lit only by a stained-glass window at the top of the stairs; in the dining room, a chandelier hangs by old wiring from a cracked ceiling above a water-stained table.
Young Jared Grace doesn’t like the place, but his mother points out that the house, lent to them by their great-aunt Lucinda, is a second chance. Their father left the family, and Jared’s schoolwork plummeted; he got into fights and would have been expelled had they not moved away.
Outside, they unpack the car. Simon and Mallory—Jared’s nine-year-old twin brother and 13-year-old sister—discuss Aunt Lucinda, who lives in a psychiatric institution. She refuses meals because “little men” deliver delicious food to her. Simon, who loves animals, discovers that the mice he packed in a sock chewed their way out. Mallory scolds him for bringing them; he retorts that she got to bring all her fencing-gear “junk.” Jared defends Simon, and nearly come to blows with Mallory.
Jared drags a suitcase inside, but he hesitates. Something is moving inside a wall. Mallory and Simon come in carrying things, and Jared mentions the wall noise, which he attributes to a squirrel. Simon perks up at the idea, but Jared just wishes they were back in their New York apartment and their dad was still with them.
Chapter 2 Summary: “IN WHICH Two Walls Are Explored by Vastly Different Methods”
Leaks have rotted many of the upstairs’ bedroom floors. The children’s mom takes a good room, Mallory another, and the twins a third. Simon quickly sets up his glass tanks and jars with their mice, lizards, and fish.
Jared tries to sleep, but Simon’s creatures rustle noisily. A hinge creaks and he sits upright. A ghostly figure appears in the doorway, but it’s just Mallory in a nightgown. She says she heard the thing in the wall. Their mom is at the store, so Jared wakes Simon; all three creep along the hallway, following the noise down to the kitchen.
Mallory takes a broom and knocks a hole in the wall. Inside are bits of cloth, a doll’s head, pins pushed into the wood in a line, a set of dead cockroaches on a string, and lead soldiers with melted appendages. Mirror chips stick to the wall on old chewing gum. Mallory retrieves one of her fencing medals. She thinks the squirrel stole it, but Jared points out that squirrels don’t hang trinkets on strings.
Hoping to discourage the squirrel, the three kids pull the stuff out of the wall and toss it into a trash can. They hear the sound again and follow it to a small metal elevator, a dumbwaiter, which is used for moving food trays upstairs. Jared climbs inside—he barely fits—and Mallory tugs on the rope that lifts him upward. It’s pitch-black and he can’t see anything.
Mallory pulls Jared back down. She finds a candle in a kitchen drawer, lights it at the stove, wedges it into a jar, and hands it to Jared. Again, up he goes. He hears something scraping at the dumbwaiter. The elevator arrives at a room with a low ceiling. Jared climbs into the room. It’s filled with books. There’s no door.
Foreword-Chapter 2 Analysis
The Field Guide is the first part of a larger story contained in the five-book fantasy series The Spiderwick Chronicles. It describes several opening events in the Grace children’s adventure with the faeries that dwell in and near the old house, the place to which they move with their mother after her divorce. In this novel, the kids cope with mysterious acts of vandalism and discover an old notebook filled with descriptions of faeries; they use those descriptions to figure out what’s gone wrong and solve the problem.
The authors use authorial intrusion in this section to make the novel seem more realistic. The brief letter “from” the Grace children positions the characters as people in the real world—capable of interacting with the authors—and the authors’ delivery of the story as something they heard places the tale inside a larger context, or a frame story.
The plot unfolds from Jared’s viewpoint, as he’s the character who is struggling the most with his parents’ divorce. Because of Jared’s low self-esteem and feelings of uncertainty at the novel’s start, he is the character who will undergo the most growth; a point that’s emphasized by the third-person limited perspective. A major theme of the story is Jared’s struggle to convince his family that he, a known troublemaker, isn’t the author of the many pranks that bedevil the house. His frustrated thoughts about this dilemma, and the resulting decisions he makes, contribute to his growth as a character and to the plot’s progress, developing the theme Alienation from Family.
This novel uses the middle-grade fantasy trope of the clueless, misunderstanding parents to isolate the children from their mother and add risk and tension to the plot. The Grace siblings can see faeries, but their mother can’t, and James is blamed for acts of vandalism he didn’t commit. Because their mother can’t possibly understand what’s happening or assist in the children’s adventures, the children must resolve these potentially dangerous conflicts alone.
The opening chapters introduce the Spiderwick Mansion, which itself undergoes a type of character development. James describes it as “garish” and in a state of disrepair. His clearly disappointed description of the mansion parallels the description he gives of himself when he introduces the members of the family. James notes that each of his siblings would have brave and impressive occupations, but “he couldn’t say what job he would grow up to have. Not that anyone asked him. Not that anyone asked his opinion on anything at all” (1). Early in the novel, James, like the mansion, is characterized as unimpressive.
Things are not always as they seem, however, and the children quickly discover that the mansion is hiding an interesting interior. The first clue is the mysterious noises, which makes the mansion comparable to a haunted house. The mansion’s history—with a former tenant residing in a psychiatric institute—also gives the mansion an air of eeriness and mystery. When the children discover the dumbwaiter (a small service elevator used to transport food from one level to the next), they find the hidden library. No longer a dilapidated shack, the mansion now affords the children mystery and intrigue. This discovery foreshadows that James, like the mansion, will only need a particular set of circumstances to reveal his true character.
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