49 pages • 1 hour read
Jennifer MathieuMoxie
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A 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 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Vivian is embarrassed in English class when the teacher, Mr. Davies, calls on her; Viv never speaks up in class. When a new student to the school, Lucy Hernandez, raises her hand and answers the question, football player Mitchell Wilson interrupts her to say, “Make me a sandwich” (2). Instead of reprimanding Mitchell, the teacher gives the whole class homework.
Mitchell Wilson is the star of the football team, which is the only thing their high school in the small town of East Rockport, population 6,000, has going for it, so no one ever disciplines Mitchell about his behavior. Vivian sits with her best friend, Claudia, and their other friends for lunch. They are the “sweet, mostly normal girls […] nice girls” (6). Vivian sees Lucy sitting alone, but she doesn’t want to become a target for Mitchell and his loud friends, so Vivian doesn’t ask Lucy to sit with her.
Chapter 2 Summary
Vivian’s mom is now a nurse at the urgent care center, but in her youth, she listened to punk rock and was known for being rebellious. Their cat is named Joan Jett, after a singer in a 1970s all-girl band called the Runaways. Vivian was born in Portland, Oregon, but her dad died in a motorcycle crash when she was a baby, so her mother moved back to East Rockport to be near her parents.
Vivian is fascinated by a shoebox in her mom’s closet labeled “My Misspent Youth.” Her mom moved out west to be near bands she liked, all-girl bands who played punk rock, spoke up for equal rights, made newsletters they called “zines,” and called themselves Riot Grrrls. Looking at the pictures and the zines in the box makes Vivian “feel better. Understood somehow” (12).
She goes next door to have dinner with her grandparents, Meemaw and Grandpa, whom she thinks of as utterly conventional. Meemaw decorated her kitchen with roosters and Grandpa has his funny sayings. Vivian describes the sandwich incident, and her grandparents remark that Viv’s mother, Lisa, would have rebelled against such sexism; “She has more than her necessary share of moxie,” Meemaw says (16). In contrast, they think Vivian is dutiful.
As she chats with her mom, who is home from work, Vivian doesn’t tell Lisa about Mitchell’s remark. In bed, Vivian searches for Riot Grrrl music and plays a song called “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. She is struck by the lyrics and the singer’s strong voice.
Chapter 3 Summary
Vivian keeps hoping something will be different this year at East Rockport, but nothing has changed. She and Claudia attend the mandatory school pep rally on Friday, a lead up to the night’s football game. Vivian spots a new boy in the bleachers who doesn’t strike her as the typical Texas boy. Claudia says he is Seth Acosta, and his parents are artists from Austin. Vivian feels awkward around boys—she’s never even kissed a boy. The cheerleaders, led by Emma Johnson, perform, and then the football players come out. One of them, Jason, wears a T-shirt with a sexual innuendo. He teases Lucy, and Vivian grows angry on Lucy’s behalf. Vivian tells Claudia she won’t be going to the football game that night, and with that, she feels “something has shifted […] and now I can’t go back” (31-32).
Chapter 4 Summary
Left alone while everyone else is at the game, Vivian watches a documentary about Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, who talks about finding ways for girls to connect. In her mom’s shoebox, Viv reads a zine called the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, in which Hanna writes “we are angry at a society that tells us Girl=Dumb, Girl=Bad, Girl=Weak”; instead, Hanna writes, she believes “girls constitute a revolution soul force that can, and will, change the world” (38). Excited and inspired, Vivian creates a zine, then bikes to the copy shop. The guy working there, Frank, shows Vivian how to run the copiers. Viv’s zine, Moxie, features pop art and handwritten notes and drawings, with the slogan “Moxie girls fight back” (45). The zine asks if girls are tired of the football team getting away with insults and sexist comments and encourages girls to draw hearts and stars on their hands for school on Friday.
Chapter 5 Summary
Vivian goes to school early on Monday to leave copies of her zine in the girls’ bathroom. She worries about what will happen if she’s caught, but she distributes the magazines and then waits to see the reaction, thinking, “I feel my heart pulsing, full of something important” (51). Her friends see the magazine, and while some support it, Claudia is cautious and says she doesn’t know what the hearts and stars will accomplish. Vivian is worried Moxie is a dud until she sees Lucy Hernandez with a copy in English class. Mitchell takes Lucy’s copy and makes fun of it, asking Lucy if she wrote it. Vivian introduces herself to Lucy and gives her another copy after class.
Chapter 6 Summary
As she shops for groceries with her mom, Vivian tries to decide if she will draw hearts and stars on her hands the next day. They run into John, whom Lisa works with, and Vivian is unsettled by her mom’s warm response to him. Vivian points out that John has a bumper sticker supporting a Republican candidate on his car, and Lisa swore she’d never vote Republican. Her mom only dated one other guy that Vivian can remember, and Vivian admits, “I always felt like I was waiting for him to leave” (64).
In her first period classes, Vivian is the only girl with drawings on her hands. Her friend Sara asks what it means. Vivian is embarrassed and a little annoyed that people keep calling Moxie a newsletter instead of a zine. She thinks, “I just have to hang on until I can get out of here, like my mother. If I only knew where I was going. If only I could be sure I would never come back” (67).
Then, in the bathroom, Vivian sees that Kiera Daniels has hearts and stars on her hands. She and Kiera were friends in grade school but then, in middle school, the kids started to segregate by ethnicity and culture. Kiera complains that while the football team has expensive new equipment, the girls’ soccer team hasn’t had new uniforms in years. Keira says Moxie needs to be bigger and more girls need to get involved. Vivian thinks of how the Riot Grrrls didn’t want a leader; “They wanted the movement to be one where everyone had an equal voice” (69). Viv keeps quiet about creating Moxie but sees more girls with decorated hands, including Lucy. Seth Acosta comes to English class with hearts and stars on his hands, and Vivien is elated.
Chapter 7 Summary
At the pep rally, Vivian gushes to Claudia about Seth. Lucy sits with them and talks about a club she was part of at her school in Houston, a feminist club called GRIT. Vivian is a little stunned by Lucy’s use of the word “feminist.” They invite Lucy to the football game with them; there is not much else for teenagers to do in East Rockport besides cruise the Sonic or Dairy Queen. Vivian’s mom is going to the game with John, who is one of the doctors for the team. Vivian decides she doesn’t like John. Vivian enjoys sitting with her friends and Lucy at the game, then invites Claudia to spend the night. Claudia thinks the word feminist is a little scary and weird, and she would rather just say she’s for equality. Vivian is upset because this is the first time she and Claudia have ever disagreed. Vivian feels she’s waiting for something.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
Told in the first-person point of view through the eyes of Vivian, a 16-year-old junior in high school, these chapters set the scene and provide the inciting incident that will propel the plot into motion. Two dramatic structures underlie this plot arc. One is the heroic journey, where the protagonist departs from the known world and commits to a quest that will change both her and the world she knows. A second is the coming-of-age story, where the protagonist undergoes an ordeal or an experience that brings out new strengths, talents, and dimensions of her character, growing into a more mature and self-aware version of herself in the end.
The book signals its place in the young adult genre by addressing the situation of teenaged characters. The small town of East Rockport, Texas, located on the Gulf of Mexico, is politically conservative and somewhat lacking in cultural activity; the main entertainment for teenagers is visiting chain restaurants to see who’s out and about. The town culture, which is built around the sport of football, doesn’t interest Vivian. While she wishes things could be different, she doesn’t have a vision of what that difference might mean until she looks into her mom’s old shoebox of photos and zines. In seeing her mother’s teenage rebelliousness, her interest in loud music and outspoken beliefs, Vivian gets a glimpse not only into her mother’s past but also into an alternate future for herself—a future where she is not the dutiful girl, but rather a girl who has grown in Maturity, Agency, and Independence and speaks up about her dissatisfaction.
Before this glimpse into her mom’s engagement with Activism, Tradition, and Change, Vivian doesn’t have a way to name or understand her feelings. She hasn’t enjoyed the atmosphere at East Rockport but believes that’s just how things are—the boys on the football team will behave like jerks and get away with it, teachers or school administrators will never reprimand or discipline them for sexist or insulting behavior, and the only thing she can do is keep her head down, be quiet, get through, and get out. But when she sees Lucy, who has good ideas and is ready to talk about interesting topics, being humiliated in class, Vivian suddenly sees how all the school’s culture must look to an outsider, and she can’t bear it any longer. She wants to express herself, like the singers in the music she starts listening to. She wants to channel the powerful anger that she sees expressed in the lyrics and the zines her mother kept. She chooses Moxie as the title because Meemaw uses this word—a combination of energy, gutsiness, and defiance—to describe Lisa, Vivian’s mother, and Vivian is hoping to channel a bit of her mother in this act of resistance.
Vivian’s conflict over creating and distributing Moxie makes her believable as a quiet person who believes she will get into trouble for speaking her mind, especially if she’s angry. Teaching girls to express only positive feelings or engage in conciliatory behaviors—the logic behind being a “lady”—merely teaches them they are not permitted to express anger, even when they experience injustice. Vivian, as her feminist awakening unfolds, realizes this habit of invalidating girls’ anger and frustration is part of the ideology used to diminish and silence them.
The lack of reception for Moxie creates tension and humor as Viv fears her efforts fall flat. But the zine leads to new connections: to Kiera, a Black girl (Vivian is white) with whom Vivian was once friends; to a feeling of identification with Lucy; and to seeing Seth side with the girls. The word “feminist” gives Vivian, for the first time, a way to formulate her beliefs and understand what she’s asking for. Claudia is a foil for Vivian because their different interpretations of equality create, for the first time, a rift between these two old friends. Claudia expresses a judgment often used to silence or deflect claims of sexism, that of accusing feminists of being angry, shrill, or full of hatred. This type of complaint rebukes feminists for the tone of their message rather than addressing the content—their claims of injustice.
Mathieu addresses Cliques, Outsiders, and the Fear of Standing Out in the conventional small-town high school by noting the different groups or cliques that people fall into: the Black girls; the Spanish-speaking girls; the football jocks; the cheerleaders, led by Emma Johnson; and then the nice girls, which is how Vivian describes her crowd. Many of the figures of authority are not credible: Principal Wilson is a buffoonish character more interested in supporting the football team than student education, and the teachers are likewise uninspiring. Vivian has a supportive relationship with her grandparents and her mother, but that relationship changes with the introduction of John, a co-worker her mom is dating and whom Vivian automatically resists as an intruder. At the same time, Vivian deals with intense attraction to the new boy, who again introduces a different perspective she hasn’t seen: Seth doesn’t follow the usual masculine script of an arrogant athlete. All these elements work to push Vivian out of the world she’s known and propel her to grow and change as a character.
