47 pages • 1 hour read
J. A. WhiteNightbooks
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: “The Other Side”
Alex and Yasmin enter the forest through Natacha’s door. They notice the presence of magical plants. Monstrous, red-eyed unicorns follow the children, attempting to impale them, but Alex realizes they are safe on the path. As the children follow the path, the unicorns follow, and Alex wonders if Natacha turned Unicorn Girl into one of these monsters when she tried to escape.
The children realize they are still inside the apartment when they spot wallpaper under the bark of a nearby tree. Aware their plan failed, Yasmin says they must “revise.” They see a cottage made of candy, and Alex suggests that Natacha is the witch from Hansel and Gretel. When Yasmin points out that it’s only a story, Alex disagrees, pointing out the ways in which her apartment is similar to the candy house. They slowly approach the cottage, but before either can stop themselves, they are shoving sweets into their mouths.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Natacha’s Story”
Alex awakens on the floor of the candy house’s kitchen. Natacha is preparing food and tells him he’s been unconscious for two days. She says that the apartment’s rumbling is getting worse, that “she” only wants Alex’s stories now. When Alex asks who Natacha means, the witch tells him, “She is the apartment, Alex. Don’t you understand anything? They’re one and the same now!” (258).
Natacha tells Alex that she is only 29, that “Aunt Gris”—the original witch who created the candy house, forest, and magical apartment—took her prisoner 20 years ago. She used Natacha’s obsession with unicorns to lure her, and Alex realizes that Natacha is Unicorn Girl. Aunt Gris ate children to stay young, and Natacha befriended her other captive, Ian. One day, however, Aunt Gris cooked him and forced Natacha to clean the oven. That’s when Natacha decided she would never be powerless again.
Now, she places two bowls of stew on the table, encouraging Alex to eat with her. She also prepared a sleeping potion and drugged Aunt Gris, so she can’t fault Alex for doing the same to her. Natacha reminds him how similar she and he are, suggesting he could stay as her “friend” rather than her captive. He realizes he’ll have to go along with her suggestion if he’s to escape. Natacha seems “genuinely thrilled” when he says that he does feel at home there.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Aunt Gris”
Natacha takes him down the hall to a room with a coffin made of blue rock candy in the center. He sees Yasmin and Lenore in a cell to one side, and when Yasmin asks if he’s under a spell, he tells her he’s Natacha’s friend now.
Natacha explains that, before she could kill Aunt Gris, the house sealed her inside the candy shell to protect itself. When a witch dies, her spells reverse, so if Natacha killed Aunt Gris as she planned, the house would cease to exist. Natacha says that the blue mist she inhales each night is produced by melting down a piece of Aunt Gris’s coffin; this is how she accesses the witch’s magic.
Alex asks why Natacha didn’t simply return to her family once she was free, and Natacha says she didn’t want to go back to being “normal.” Now, however, everything shakes when Aunt Gris gets restless, and the only thing that soothes her is a scary story. The shaking begins again, but Alex doesn’t have any more stories. Natacha suggests he tell the real story behind his desire to destroy his nightbooks. Natacha threatens to kill Yasmin and Lenore if he refuses. Alex thinks of Scheherazade and takes a deep breath.
Alex was in math class with he was called to the school counselor’s office. The counselor asked him a lot of questions and revealed that teachers were concerned about the stories Alex wrote. Alex explained that they were only make-believe, but the counselor didn’t believe it. Alex feared that if he didn’t stop writing, he’d become the boy the counselor believed he was.
When he describes his self-doubt and sense of isolation, the house settles, and Natacha applauds. However, Alex continues, he didn’t destroy his nightbooks; instead, he learned how “real darkness isn’t fun, like in stories,” that “It’s not who [he is] at all” (274). The house begins to shake again, and Aunt Gris moves. He realizes that stories of friendship and compassion upset her.
The house begins to fall apart, and the sleeping mist leaks from the coffin. Aunt Gris sits up, and Alex is so horrified he cannot even scream. She is made of candy now, like the house. Natacha acts like she’s been waiting for Aunt Gris to awaken, and Alex frees his friends while Natacha helps her up. Suddenly, Aunt Gris remembers what Natacha did, and Natacha tries to run. The children hear her screams as they flee.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Unexpected Magic”
Alex, Yasmin, and Lenore run through the forest, toward the apartment. When they reach it, Yasmin explains that Lenore got a full dose of the mist that gave Natacha her magic, but Aunt Gris suddenly appears. The kids run for the front door, which is open, and Aunt Gris crashes into an invisible wall created by Lenore. She is disappointed that her cat doesn’t show more loyalty, and she slits the wall with a fingernail.
The children take the elevator to the basement, leading the witch there. When Aunt Gris arrives, she attempts to fit Yasmin’s entire head into her mouth; Alex begins reading from his last nightbook. This gets Aunt Gris’s attention. She follows him as he continues reading sentences from stories he never finished, slowly advancing toward the boiler. Aunt Gris demands the book, desperate to know what happens next, and Alex tosses it into the flames. Yasmin shoves Aunt Gris in after it, and Alex slams the door shut. Like candy, she melts quickly into a pile of burned sugar.
Chapter 22 Summary: “The Gift”
Yasmin and Alex meet at the park on a late spring day. The mystery of their disappearance captured the world’s attention after a total of 58 missing children were found wandering the halls of the apartment building. The other kids have no memory of what happened to them after entering 4E, and the apartment became completely ordinary after Aunt Gris died, so Yasmin and Alex pretended not to remember.
Yasmin hands Alex a notebook covered with pictures of the creepy things he likes. She looks for Lenore, who is sleeping under a tree; they take turns taking care of her, but she’s happiest when they’re all together.
Chapters 18-22 Analysis
The final chapters reinforce The Value of Friendship, and of belonging and acceptance by others. Natacha reveals that it was losing her friend, Ian, that persuaded her to find a way to kill Aunt Gris and steal her magic. Alex realizes that “Unicorn Girl climbed into the oven that day […] and someone completely different climbed out” (262) because she had lost her only friend in the world. When Natacha asks Alex to stay with her as a friend rather than a captive, he realizes that, “She’s lonely […] It was strange to imagine that Natacha might desire human companionship just like anyone else, but he supposed it made sense” (264) because she’d been friendless for two decades.
The sincerity of her request is reinforced by the fact that she cooks for him, serves him, and eats with him while she offers him her friendship, reinforcing the importance of the novel’s food motif (See: Symbols & Motifs). Before, when he was her captive, she controlled what little food he could eat while she ate rather lavishly; now, sharing her stew signifies her changing feelings toward him and indicates her hope that he will be her friend. When Alex agrees to stay and be Natacha’s friend, she seems “genuinely thrilled” with his decision, and he realizes how much she has missed friendship. Even the cat that he and Yasmin assumed was Natacha’s belonged to Aunt Gris and, therefore, Lenore couldn’t offer the companionship and camaraderie Natacha craved.
Moreover, when Alex tells his own story to Aunt Gris and sees her stir when he mentions his desire to avoiding hurting others, he realizes that “If scary stories are the sweet dreams that lull her to sleep […] then courage, friendship, compassion—those are the nightmares that will wake her up” (275). If stories of catastrophe and others’ pain soothe the witch, then tales of love and care have the opposite effect, showing just how powerful they are. This is why Natacha gets so angry when Alex reads the story about the living boy who is saved by his dead best friend: It could have the wrong effect on Aunt Gris, and it also reminds Natacha of how alone she is.
Finally, Lenore’s happiness seems to be guaranteed by her friendships with Alex and Yasmin. Once they escape 4E, “Yasmin and Alex took turns taking care of her, though they suspected that she was happiest when the three of them were together” (294). Friendship offers the cat something more valuable than magic ever could.
The Power of Storytelling is also highlighted and explained by the similarities between fairytales and life that are revealed in these final chapters. When the children’s escape doesn’t go as planned, Yasmin points out that Alex knows what to do next: “[R]evise” the plan. As a writer, things often don’t quite work out as Alex hoped, and he must revise what he’s written if he’s to use it. As one teacher told him, “Every sentence is a learning experience—no writing is ever wasted” (288). When their plan fails, the children try to learn from what doesn’t work. The same is often said of life—that no experience is wasted if one learns from it.
What is true of stories is often true of life, as the children recognize when they witness the similarities between Natacha’s apartment and the candy house, each tempting children with whatever they love most. When Yasmin says that Natacha cannot be the witch from Hansel and Gretel because “That’s [only] a story” (253), Alex claims that fairy tales can be true, or at least, they can contain truth.
This emotional truth is what makes storytelling powerful enough to become its own a type of magic in Chapter 21, titled “Unexpected Magic.” As Alex tantalizes Aunt Gris with sentences from his unfinished stories, she “followed him as though in a trance, releasing Yasmin without even realizing it […] Right now, he was casting a spell of his own” (288). Storytelling, therefore, is revealed to be the “Unexpected Magic” to which the chapter’s title refers. Alex’s stories have already worked magic, putting Aunt Gris back to sleep when Natacha’s sleeping potion no longer sufficed. He knows that, like Scheherazade, his stories “saved [his] life,” and he asks himself, “Why did I want to destroy them?” (276). He realizes that stories are powerful in myriad ways for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that they reveal truth about life itself and present important lessons we can use to learn about ourselves and others.
