37 pages • 1 hour read
LancaliI Fell in Love with Hope
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Before”
Sam (the narrator) and his love (also named Sam) have terminal illnesses. They live their lives in and out of hospitals, pretending the world can be theirs forever. Reality forces its way through, and the narrator Sam tells his love a secret that he keeps from the audience. His love goes to a local bridge to die by suicide, and the narrator goes to find him. It starts to snow, and Sam, the narrator’s lover, jumps to his death after one final conversation with Sam the narrator.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Yellow-Flared Eyes: Years Later…”
Sam compares disease to an unseeable bomb with an unknown detonation time. He compares illnesses to thieves who steal time from people who live—that it is the greatest theft to happen to the world, until he and his friends decided that they wanted to steal even more.
Sam, Neo, Coeur (called “C”), and Sony scope out and rob a nearby gas station. Sony uses cancer as an excuse, while the others walk out with a variety of items including cigarettes, beer, and sunglasses. They return to the hospital where the resident nurse, Eric, catches them coming back; he does not know that they were stealing from a store. The group makes their way to the roof to celebrate their success and plan their biggest heist—escaping from the hospital. Eric finds them again while giving a new patient a tour.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Sunrise”
Eric takes Sony, Neo, and C back to their rooms and leaves the new patient, Hikari, with Sam for a tour. Instead of the tour, Hikari draws Sam into another heist; they go down to the library and Hikari steals the blades of a pencil sharpener and some paper. They make their escape while Sam reflects on the similarities between Hikari’s soul and his dead lover’s soul. They make it safely to Hikari’s floor before her parents catch her; Hikari promises they’ll steal together again sometime. Hikari goes to her room with her parents. Sony and C come for Sam because Neo’s surgery starts sooner than expected.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Resilience: Three Years Ago”
Neo arrives at the hospital; Sam hangs around the nurses’ station with nothing better to do. Eric tells Sam to take Neo’s food tray in, which he does. This becomes a routine, through which Sam experiences glimpses of Neo’s life—his love of writing, his father’s anger, Neo’s favorite books, the worst moments of Neo’s eating disorder, movie nights, and the aftereffects of Neo’s father’s abuse. The two become close friends as Sam keeps Neo’s secrets.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Soliloquies”
Sam rescues Neo’s books from his room and follows Hikari to the roof of the hospital. She walks along the edge of the roof, reminding him of the other Sam’s suicide. He talks her off the edge, though she does not fear falling, and they go inside to read Hamlet and act it out together. As they progress through the play, Sam frustrates Hikari because of his lack of emotion. Hikari explores Sam’s soul and digs into why he isolates himself. She confesses that she is intrigued by him and wants to get closer to him, despite his efforts to keep her at a distance. They agree to meet up each night so Sam can practice being alive.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Hee”
Neo comes through his surgery with Sam and C sitting by his bedside. Sam asks about Hikari, which amuses C because Sam tries so hard to be uninterested. When Neo wakes up, Sony and Hikari enter the room with a rescue cat they name Hee, and begin a five-way heist to steal something for another person in the group. They write what they will steal on a shared piece of paper. Hikari will steal for Sam, and she plans to steal him a dream. Later, Sam and Sony are alone in Sam’s room, where Sony learns that her remaining lung is failing and that her illness is terminal.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Passion: Two Years Ago”
The novel flashes back to when Sam first encounters Sony. He saw her when he got off the elevator on the wrong floor. Though their friendship began rocky, they soon developed a bond over chocolate. Soon, Sam introduced Sony to Neo, with whom she had an even rockier start before developing a friendship. Neo and Sony bonded over his writing and the stories he told. The three celebrated when Sony came through surgery to remove one of her lungs destroyed by disease; afterward, she insisted that she wanted wings so she could fly because she could no longer run the way she used to. Sony was in and out of the hospital until one night when she came in, shocked, after her mother died suddenly in her sleep. The boys sympathized with her, and they helped her move forward.
Flashing forward to the present, Sam promises to steal her a pair of wings.
Prologue-Chapter 6 Analysis
I Fell in Love with Hope follows the tradition of the bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story where the protagonist learns life lessons and grows as a person from the beginning of the narrative to the end. This novel has five characters, each of whom grows through the course of events: C, Hikari, Neo, Sam, and Sony. The opening chapters establish where each character begins and what they need to be “complete” people. In the Prologue, Lancali portrays the death of the narrator’s love Sam—though she does not explicitly call it suicide, it is implied. This positions the narrator Sam as a character who loses the only person he ever loved and his belief that people can’t recover from illness.
In Chapter 5, the characters make a special list of items they plan to steal for each other. The items can’t physically be taken or given, and represent what each character lacks and requires to complete their journey of growth. Sam, who no longer dreams of a future for others, requires optimism and a dream. Hikari will be the one who steals it for him. The list reflects whom characters will learn their required lesson from. Hikari is the reincarnated soul of the original Sam. She is the only person who can bring back the narrator Sam’s ability to dream of a future for people who have chronic illnesses.
Lancali introduces a key theme, Chronic Illness and Autonomy. The novel argues that working with people who have chronic illnesses means one must meet them where they are and slowly earn their trust. For example, Neo has an eating disorder and his father regularly abuses him; he doesn’t expose his true self because he fears how people will treat him. Sam pushes ever so slightly into Neo’s comfort zone, but does not force himself fully in. Sam earns Neo’s trust because he uses actions, rather than words, to prove that Neo can be himself around Sam. Sam gives Neo a degree of respect around his personal autonomy that he is usually not given, due to his eating disorder. The importance of boundaries within Sam and Neo’s relationship suggests how unimportant Neo’s boundaries are in other parts of his life, as decided by others who cross his boundaries repeatedly.
The novel spends time in both the past and present. However, Lancali writes each of the chapters in the present tense. Sam recounts events that already happened, but relives them as though they are currently happening. This unique use of flashback is the first sign that Sam is not a typical narrator, and that there is more to him than readers know at this point. Flashback chapters often use the past tense to signify that events happened in the past. In I Fell in Love with Hope, the headings for each chapter mention time and act as a guidepost for the reader.
Sam is not a real person, but a concept that takes physical form in the hospital. , He narrates the events of the past as though they are currently happening because to him they can be. He does not exist solely in one time or place, but can exist in all times and places. He conflates time by presenting events from multiple time periods in the same chapter. This suggests that readers should not fully trust the narrative structure, and that Sam is an unreliable narrator.
