43 pages • 1 hour read
Adam GidwitzIn A Glass Grimmly
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
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Important Quotes
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BetaChapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Descent”
The goblin leader is displeased and demands to know what the children want. When they ask about the Seeing Glass, he explains that a great beast took it from the goblins long ago and that none has ever lived to retrieve it. Jack and Jill will likely die, too, and Jack tells Jill, “You know that deal we made with the old lady? […] I don’t think it was a good one” (207).
The goblins take Jack and Jill to the entrance to the creature’s underground lair and lower them deep into the ground. The children can hear the goblins discussing how they will take the glass and kill them when they return. Once at the bottom of the drop, the children make their way to the monster’s lair, the heat and smell of the tunnels growing more and more oppressive until they can barely stand it.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Eidechse von Feuer, Der Menschenfleischfressende”
This chapter is named for the great beast that the children find deep in the caves. Jack and Jill run, but the frog understands the monster because it’s a huge salamander who speaks the amphibian language. The salamander introduces himself as Eddie and says he ate the Seeing Glass after the goblins accidentally dropped it in his mouth. Angry, the goblins drove him deep underground, where he’s been with the glass stuck in his stomach ever since.
After answering a bunch of ridiculous salamander questions, Jack and Jill crawl inside Eddie’s stomach, where they find a small disc stuck at the entrance to his intestines. They grab it and run back toward Eddie’s mouth, only for Eddie to burp them out and barely miss them with a fireball. To get back to the goblins, the group has Eddie come to where the goblins lowered them, and the children tell the goblins they killed the creature, who has gold and treasure in his stomach. The goblins hoist Eddie and the children up, and Eddie burns the goblins to a crisp so Jack and Jill can escape. The monster jumps back down into his caves, and the children and frog head into the Goblin Kingdom, “searching for a way back to the light” (246).
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Others”
Jack and Jill wander through the Goblin Kingdom until they finally find a way out to a forest on the edge of Märchen. Without realizing what’s happening, the children follow a path to a dark wood and a mansion, where the Others—the clothier, the merchant who bought Jack’s cow, and the strange woman—wait. The children hand over the glass and are brought into the mansion to wait while the three test the mirror to make sure it’s the right glass. The children follow the Others down a staircase and hallway made entirely of human bones to find the three kneeling before the glass, now polished and shining brightly. Despite reading the spell to activate the glass’s power, nothing happens, and the Others resolve to kill the children.
Jack steps into the room and asks for a chance to make the glass work. The Others give the children an hour, but the children can’t get the glass to work. Finally, they realize the Others don’t know about the frog, so when the three return, they ask the mirror specific questions while the frog answers from behind the mirror. The Others are overjoyed and expect the glass to extol how wonderful they are. Instead, the mirror gives all the credit to Jack and Jill. At Jill’s prompting, the Others ask how to become greater than the children, and the mirror tells them to atone for what they’ve done and turn themselves in for their crimes. The Others run off to do so, and the frog, crawling out from his hiding place, proclaims, “I am just a dramatic genius” (279).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Face to Face”
Jack and Jill go their separate ways back to the homes they left. Jack’s father welcomes him home, saying he missed him, and Jack returns to following the boys around, hoping they’ll stop teasing him. One day, Jack realizes he doesn’t care if the boys like him, and, feeling more secure in who he is, he walks away. Meanwhile, Jill returns to sitting at her mother’s side while the woman applies makeup and looks in the mirror. Angry nothing has changed, Jill shatters the mirror and runs to the well, where she finds Jack and the frog. The frog asks why the children’s homecomings didn’t go well. Jill replies that the castle isn’t her home because “home is where you can be yourself” (292).
Jack and Jill walk until they come to a crowd, where a boy explains three criminals turned themselves in as murderers and were sentenced to roll down a hill. When the children argue it isn’t a strict punishment, a boy tells them about the beggar judge—a man the king made a judge after he gave his blanket to the naked princess. When the Others confess their crimes, the judge makes them his assistants and asks them to sentence a murderer. They say the murderer should be nailed inside a barrel and rolled down a hill, so the judge imposes this sentence on the Others.
Jack and Jill spend the winter huddled and freezing in the woods. When spring arrives, the children start to play and enjoy life, not caring what the people of the kingdom think. Soon after, other children join them. Jack, Jill, and the frog tell the stories of what happened to them to increasingly large groups of children. The last story they tell is of finding the mirror and realizing they were never looking for the glass—instead, they were looking for themselves. The narrator cuts in to tell the reader the mirror itself wasn’t magic but that all mirrors have magic of a kind because “they show you yourself, after all” (310).
After they finish the story, Eddie arrives with the three ravens perched on his head. Jill’s parents also come, and her mother has realized what’s truly important with her mirror broken. As everyone answers Eddie’s questions, the three ravens talk about how Jack and Jill will grow up, rule the kingdom wisely, and live happily ever after.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
The goblins are the primary antagonists in the final section of the novel. Since the children are close to finding the glass, more is at stake. In addition, now that Jack and Jill have overcome their insecurities, at least for the moment, the external threats become more apparent. Ironically, the goblins are a greater threat than Eddie, who is a stand-in for the large and dangerous creatures (often dragons) that guard treasure in fairy tales. Instead of an evil creature fiercely protecting its horde, Eddie is a kind and mostly harmless creature who wants friends and people to talk to. Gidwitz subverts the final battle of the fairy-tale genre because instead of defeating the beast in combat, the children answer questions and purposefully crawl into Eddie’s mouth. The frog’s ability to talk to Eddie makes the four of them a team. Like the mermaid in Chapter 9, the goblins twist the truth to paint themselves as victims. When the children learn the truth, the cleverness they honed in earlier chapters allows them to escape the Goblin Kingdom with Eddie’s help, showing how Jack and Jill have grown and become a compilation of everything they’ve faced, together and separately.
Chapter 11 offers a more traditional fairy-tale battle. Jack and Jill make their way to the home of the Others without realizing where they are going, so the Others use the powerful magic villains in such tales often possess. In another fairy-tale trope, the Others turn out to be people familiar to the children. The Others have been part of Jack’s and Jill’s lives for longer than the children know, setting their trap and learning how to trick the children into doing their bidding. Jack and Jill use their cleverness again to defeat the Others. By having the frog pretend to be the voice of the glass, the children convince the Others that they must take specific action (turning themselves in) to get what they want. The Others believe they must do as the children tell them because they do not understand The Importance of Self-Trust. Like Jack and Jill in earlier chapters, the Others depend on external validation to believe in themselves and think they are as wonderful as they want to be. Without that validation, they become lost, showing what Jack and Jill would have become without the lessons they learned along their journey. As the glass, the frog gives all the credit to Jack and Jill, and while his speaking as the mirror is part of the ploy to fool the Others, it is also the frog’s acknowledgment that the children have grown and changed.
Jack’s and Jill’s homecomings show how returning to the places they left has the power to undo all their progress. At the chapter’s outset, neither realizes that they must be diligent about the changes they’ve undergone. It’s not enough for the changes to occur—they must also use their new knowledge to change how they view the world and those around them. When Jack stops giving the village boys power over him, he completes his character arc and becomes his own person. His self-acceptance is more powerful than any external acceptance, and it gives him the strength to live with Jill away from the constraints of society. Similarly, Jill returns to her mother’s side but is no longer content to be ignored. Shattering her mother’s mirror is Jill’s final turning point. She realizes that she must believe in herself and that the attention or opinions of others have no power over who she is. Jack and Jill end the book understanding What We Seek Is Inside Us, The Importance of Self-Trust, and The Difference Between Wish and Want. Leaving society and the wishes they had so they can pursue the lives they want gives them power over their present and future.
The beggar judge represents the peripheral characters of fairy tales who change due to a single moment. The beggar’s giving his blanket to Jill inspired the king to help the man by making him a judge so he no longer had to beg. His method to sentence the Others in Chapter 12 is ironic in a few ways. First, the Others take the proclamation of the mirror seriously and turn themselves in, not realizing the damage they are doing to themselves. When the judge takes advantage of their insecurities, he demonstrates what could have become of Jack and Jill without the lessons they learned. By making the Others his assistants, the judge grants them what they think they want—greatness and power. However, when the judge asks them to sentence a murderer, the Others cause their own downfalls. The Others’ lack of self-confidence destroys them. They are too consumed by the images of their potential greatness to see the judge’s trap closing in around them, and they cannot think past their desperate hopes for acceptance to realize what is happening until it’s too late.
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By Adam Gidwitz
