42 pages • 1 hour read
Shannon Hale, Illustr. LeUyen PhamReal Friends
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Middle Grade | 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.
Summary
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
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Important Quotes
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BetaChapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5, Pages 176-186 Summary: “Wendy”
Shannon has her 11th birthday party. Most members of The Group, including Adrienne, do not come, but Shannon is relieved; she has enough other friends now to have a good party. Zara gives Shannon some tapes, and all the girls have fun dancing to the music. Wendy watches from the stairs, looking upset, but she says nothing.
A while later, Wendy plans her own party. She sets up food and makes sure that her younger siblings will not interrupt, but when the day comes, no one shows up to the party. Shannon’s mom is worried about Wendy. She had hoped Wendy would have a better time at her new school, but this seems not to be the case. She explains to Shannon that Wendy has always had a hard time socially and that in elementary school, other girls were cruel to her and did not want to be her friend. In junior high, girls played a trick on Wendy by faking an invite for a sleepover at another girl’s house. When Wendy got dropped off for the sleepover, the girl was reluctant to have an uninvited guest stay for a sleepover, but both girls’ mothers insisted, hoping to smooth over the awkward situation. At school, the girls who played the prank laughed at Wendy. Shannon looks out the window and sees Wendy sitting alone, looking sad. She waves, and Wendy, drawn in her fearsome bear form, waves forlornly back.
Chapter 5, Pages 187-191 Summary: “Wendy”
The school year is coming to an end. Amy and Nicole are excited to be in sixth grade next year. Jen shyly approaches Shannon and asks her about being friends with Zara and Veronica. Shannon replies that they are nice and asks Jen about some books that they have both read. Jen and Shannon talk excitedly about books, and Jenny comes up to them. She tells Jen that everyone is waiting for her, and Jen leaves with her. Shannon plays soccer with the boys as Jen watches from a distance.
Later in the hallway, Jenny runs up to Shannon and twists her arm. She tells Shannon that there is no way that Jen will let her back into The Group after all of her friends in the sixth grade graduate. At lunch, Shannon worries that she will be friendless next year. Around her, all her sixth-grade friends talk about how excited they are for junior high. At another lunch table, Jen’s friends fight over who gets to sit next to her. Jen looks uncomfortable and asks The Group not to do this anymore.
Chapter 5, Pages 192-202 Summary: “Wendy”
Shannon plays soccer outside. Once again, Jen approaches her. She asks Shannon if she can be part of Shannon’s friend group. Shannon was not expecting this and did not realize that she had a group of her own. She realizes that although she has been imagining Jen as an aloof queen, Jen is also just a nervous kid like her. Shannon agrees to let Jen hang out with her and her friends, and Jen admits to Shannon that she was “getting sick of being the leader of The Group” (197), and she does not like that her friends just wait for her to tell them what to do. Shannon and Jen agree to keep their group small next year after Zara and Veronica go to junior high school. They will not make anyone line up in order of preference. They plan to share a locker and fill it with candy.
For the school’s field day, Shannon and all her friends, including Zara and Veronica, go shopping and buy stylish clothes. Shannon, Jen, Amy and Nicole practice “being sixth graders” (199) by being nice to everyone. Jenny comes up to them and asks if she can be part of their group. Shannon is surprised. She wants to be nice, but she does not trust Jenny not to hurt her. She apologizes but says Jenny cannot join.
Chapter 5, Pages 203-213 Summary: “Wendy”
That summer, Wendy decides to move to Los Angeles to become a model. Her parents argue about it, but they do not know how to stop her. Shannon goes into Wendy’s room, which will be her new room, while Wendy packs. At first, she thinks that Wendy will be mad at her, but Wendy just says that her day of freedom has finally come. She asks Shannon if she is excited for sixth grade. Shannon admits that she is afraid and tells Wendy all about her troubles with Jenny and how she told her that she cannot be part of the new group. Wendy says that she bet it felt good to tell Jenny no. Shannon is not sure, especially because Jenny will be in her class next year.
Wendy suggests that it might be better to make amends with Jenny, and the two sisters commiserate over how frustrating friends can be sometimes. Wendy makes Shannon promise to write to her and tell her what happens with Jenny and when she has her first kiss. She gives Shannon some of her old clothes and a Billy Idol poster and then helps her rearrange the furniture to make the room her own. “The bear” and Shannon finally make peace with one another.
Shannon writes Wendy a letter and then finally sits down to write a story. She writes a fantasy story about a girl with red hair who thought that she would always be alone. When an evil force rises in the north, she goes to fight. In her darkest hour, she calls out for help and is answered by “the many friends she had made on her journey” (210), including Jen, Zara, Veronica, Nicole, Amy, Kayla, and Wendy. They help her defeat the evil and realize that “no one’s destiny is to be alone” (212).
Chapter 5 Analysis
Shannon completes her journey in this final section of the book. After a great deal of struggle, she is finally Forming Genuine Friendships with those around her. She has enough friends for a birthday party, even if most of the girls from The Group do not attend. For a long time, Shannon assumes that Jen loves her position as the leader of The Group, but she learns that she was wrong. Jen wants genuine friendships, too, and she cannot have them when everyone in her friend group looks up to her as though she is a queen. By pulling away from The Group to be friends with Shannon again, Jen demonstrates her resilience and desire for authentic connection. In the final scenes of the book, Shannon and Wendy also develop a bond that becomes genuine and caring. Now that Wendy knows that she is about to leave home, she is no longer constantly frustrated with her sister and her situation. The sisters are able to have a more open conversation where they commiserate about the difficulties of maintaining close friendships.
When the book ends, Shannon has gained and lost many friends. Adrienne is conspicuously missing from the final section of the book: After she switches to a Gifted and Talented program, her friendship with Shannon seems to dissolve. Shannon was always more invested in their connection than Adrienne was. Without Adrienne’s continued investment, it becomes very difficult for Shannon to maintain a strong friendship with her. Instead, she learns to prioritize friends who reciprocate her energy and genuinely want to spend time with her. She succeeds in her goal, as evidenced by her birthday party.
Part of Shannon’s journey of Coming of Age and Gaining Confidence involves learning what Wendy has been experiencing all this time. Besides some relatively brief periods of isolation, Shannon has never really been totally without friends. Wendy, on the other hand, has lacked close friends for virtually her entire childhood. Nobody comes to her birthday party, in sharp contrast to Shannon’s party. When Shannon looks out the window at her older sister’s non-existent party, she is finally able to extend Wendy her sympathies. Wendy, for her part, has grown up with a lot of responsibility to care for her four younger siblings. She has never had someone close to confide in, and she has never felt as though she fits in. Moving to Los Angeles represents an opportunity for a better, freer life than she had at home.
Another part of Shannon’s coming-of-age journey is developing the confidence to befriend the sixth-grade students in her class. When Jen sees Shannon playing soccer with the older kids, she admires her ability to function outside the constraints of The Group. Shannon and her new friends try to carry on Zara and Veronica’s legacy of being nice to everyone as they prepare for the sixth grade. Shannon spends a lot of the story worrying that she is not good enough, and other kids like Jenny pick up on those worries, using them to tease and demean her. Once Shannon starts acting like she believes in herself, other people start to treat her better, too.
After struggling to stand up for herself for most of the story, Shannon finally has a breakthrough in Setting Personal Boundaries when she tells Jenny that she cannot join her friend group. The adult Shannon, who is narrating, knows that she hurt Jenny’s feelings by excluding her, but she also acknowledges that she did not know of any other way to keep herself from getting hurt again. Jenny is threatened by Shannon and Jen’s friendship since she is close to Jen, so she does everything in her power to keep them apart. When that fails, her last-ditch effort is to try and stay close to Jen by joining Shannon’s group. Following Shannon’s example, Jen also grows as a person when she starts setting personal boundaries with The Group: She asks them to stop idolizing her and chooses to prioritize her friendship with Shannon. Later books in this series continue Shannon’s story as she grows up. While she has learned a lot about herself, her struggles with her friendships are not entirely over.
