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.
Themes
The Value of Friendship
The importance of friendship, and the acceptance and sense of belonging it creates, is demonstrated time and again by the characters. For Yasmin and Alex, friendship becomes their lifeline while in the apartment and helps to facilitate their successful escape with Lenore, while even Natacha longs for the power of companionship.
Both Yasmin and Alex realize the value of friendship, especially when life gets tough, such as when one becomes the captive of a hard-to-please witch. When Yasmin tells her story to Alex, she talks about the attachment she developed with Eli, Hwan, and Claire, and how, although they only knew one another for a short time, it didn’t matter. She says, “Living through such a horrible experience pushes you together a lot faster than regular life […] None of us were happy. But at least we had each other” (159). Having each other made their hardships easier to endure.
Likewise, Alex’s friendship with Yasmin—which develops despite her insistence that she doesn’t want friends anymore—operates similarly. He thinks that “there was […] a link between them, a shared experience that no one else could ever understand,” and his affection for her even prompts him to “scrap[e] together as much bravery as he could and ste[p] in front of Yasmin” (138) when Natacha threatens to kill her. Though Alex always used to believe he was a coward, his friendship with Yasmin gives him the strength to be brave, saving her life.
Natacha also recognizes the value of friendship, despite her hardened exterior. When Natacha tries to convince Alex to stay in the apartment and be her friend, she says, “You’re a child of darkness, just like me. You don’t need to return to a world that doesn’t understand. You can make a home here, as I have” (264). He recognizes her loneliness because he, too, has felt it. She knows the outside world offered Alex few friends, and so she tries to entice him to stay with her acceptance. Moreover, it was losing her friend, Ian, that turned the once-hopeful little girl into a villain. When Natacha tells Alex this part of her story, he realizes that, “Unicorn Girl climbed into the oven that day […] and someone completely different climbed out. It made him sad” (262). When Aunt Gris killed her friend, Natacha snapped.
Thus, whether it is through the comfort provided by a friend, or the loneliness and pain that ensues when one loses a friend, these characters’ experiences and feelings show how valuable a true friend is.
The Universality of Weirdness
For a long time, Alex believes that he is singularly weird, a “freak” because of the joy he receives from writing scary stories. After he meets Yasmin, however, she reveals that she spent an entire winter memorizing 20 years’ worth of New York Mets players and their jersey numbers. This helps him to realize that everyone is weird in their own way, and that his predilection for writing creepy stories doesn’t make him weirder than anyone else. His self-acceptance thus becomes a key part of his character arc and forms the basis of one of the novel’s core themes.
Natacha’s repeated claims about the similarities between herself and Alex initially add to his concern that he is some kind of evil deviant. Natacha kidnaps and hurts children, so Alex doesn’t want to believe that he is like her in any way. She tells him there’s nothing he can do about being different: “We are what we are. These stories, they’re just the real you bubbling to the surface: weird and dark and twisted” (86). Alex hates hearing this, as it seems to confirm “everything that he has always feared” (86) about himself. Only later does Alex recognize the important ways in which he differs from Natacha: That he feels compassion for Lenore, that he doesn’t want to kill Natacha though she would willingly kill him, and that he is capable of selfless actions. He finally realizes, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not bad […] I’m just a kid who likes monsters!” (276). Being “weird” doesn’t mean that he is evil.
Alex’s friendship with Yasmin helps him to realize that everyone is a little weird in their own way. She is someone that Alex likes and respects, and she enjoys his stories, failing to understand why he would want to destroy them. She accepts his differences, saying, “you are weird […] So what? It’s cool” (169). The nonchalance with which Yasmin shrugs her shoulders in response to Alex’s protests underscores her claim that, “We all have our things” (170). This helps him to realize that it’s not “just [him]” that’s weird, that people are weird in all kinds of ways.
In the end, Alex realizes that his storytelling is a gift, a talent that gives him power rather than something about which he should feel ashamed. His new friendship allows him to reclaim his personal story as he tells it to Aunt Gris, saying, “If I had never come here, I would still be the same old Alex Mosher, too scared and embarrassed to be who I am. My story might have started out on a sour note, but it has a happy ending!” (276). Thus, he may be weird, but not in the way he once believed: He now knows it is a strength rather than a weakness.
The Power of Storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful skill, as demonstrated throughout the novel. While Alex is initially so ashamed of his “nightbooks” that he wishes to burn them, he gradually learns over the narrative that stories are a gift he can take pride in creating. The novel thus celebrates the power of storytelling in various ways.
Repeated allusions to Scheherazade (See: Background) remind readers that she saved her life with her storytelling, and this foreshadows Alex’s ability to save his own life in the same way. Each night, Scheherazade tells her husband the first half of a new story, stopping at a particularly tense place to pique his interest. Eager to hear the rest of the story, he puts off killing her, eventually enabling her to convince him to spare her life permanently. Likewise, Alex uses stories to make himself valuable to Natacha, including holding back details of his own life story to retain her attention and curiosity. As long as he continues to tell good stories, he gets to live. In this way, he buys himself time to escape her captivity.
Likewise, as the children learn more about Natacha, they recognize more and more similarities between stories they believed to be fiction and their own “real” lives. When they see the cottage made of candy, Yasmin recognizes it as the “house from the fairy tale” (253). They quickly discover how the apartment is a “modern version” of the candy cottage. Alex has long recognized that stories are connected to life in significant ways, such as when he explains the significance of his nightbooks. He tells Natacha, “I have trouble sleeping. Bad dreams. The only way to get rid of them is to write them down” (25). Writing fiction helps Alex to process his life experiences.
Finally, the title of Chapter 21, “Unexpected Magic,” sheds light on the seemingly magical power stories can have. Though Aunt Gris’s pursuit of Alex and Yasmin is relentless—through the forest and apartment, then out into the real world of the building—it is Alex’s stories that ultimately stop her. As he reads creepy lines from “failed stories” he never finished, Aunt Gris “follow[s] him as though in a trance,” abandoning her pursuit of Yasmin, with Alex realizing that he is “casting a spell of his own” over her (288). The witch’s curiosity and desperation to learn what happens next distracts her enough to make her vulnerable, and this is when the children work together to kill her, just as Hansel and Gretel kill the witch in the fairy tale.
In the end, storytelling is revealed to possess a power all its own, something akin to magic. Alex uses his stories to save his own and Yasmin’s lives. Stories can be used to manipulate or enchant, to soothe or to teach. Their manifold abilities make them incredibly important, in part because they can help us to understand truths about ourselves and our own lives.
