61 pages • 2 hours read
Ingrid LawSavvy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
AddendumChapter Summaries & Analyses
Addendum: “Five Years Later” Part 1 Summary
Five years after the main events in Savvy, narrator Samson describes his 13th birthday. He spends the morning holed up in his room, reading, eating chips, and trying not to think about the savvy that’s about to spring out of him. Around noon, his sister Mibs peeks in and asks how he’s doing. He grumbles at her but appreciates her concern.
The rest of the family is busily battening down the house—wrapping breakables, taping down loose items, digging an outdoor trench to hide in—preparing for whatever chaos might be caused by Samson’s new savvy. Mibs and Fish have returned home for the birthday party, which Poppa promises will be low-key, in deference to Samson’s shyness.
A car pulls up to the house, and three people get out. Listening from upstairs, Samson hears his mother greet her sister, Dinah, and Dinah’s two kids, Fedora and Ledger. Momma is surprised to see them—it’s clear she doesn’t want more people at the party—but Dinah insists it’s a good idea, especially for her kids, who soon will have savvies of their own. Because “Aunt Dinah’s savvy g[ives] her the ability to rob people of their free will whenever and however it suit[s] her” (347), Momma feels compelled to welcome her. Dinah greets the others, who also can’t say no to her. She embarrasses Fish about his job at a TV weather channel and his love life; a breeze skitters through the house. Fedora runs off to play with Tucker.
Samson tries to sneak away to an outdoor hammock, but a mail truck, a floral delivery van, and the Meeks’s van all arrive simultaneously. The mailman loads Samson down with packages and letters. Tucker, half-wrapped in tape by Fedora, runs away from her and around Samson; Ledger and Gypsy join the chase. The Meeks’s van blows a tire as it skids to a stop. Miss Rosemary emerges with a gift, a Bible, and a side dish.
It’s all too much for Samson, who hates crowds. He goes weak-kneed and closes his eyes. Ledger says, “Whooooa,” and Tucker asks where Samson went. Searching for his brother, Tucker runs through Samson.
Addendum: “Five Years Later” Part 2 Summary
Samson feels much better, but then he looks down: Both he and the packages he holds are invisible. Fedora reaches around where she last saw Samson; her hands go right through him. Stunned, Samson lets go of the parcels, which promptly become visible again. Fedora stumbles over them, smacks her head on the porch, and begins crying. Everyone is shouting at once for Samson.
Eight-year-old Gypsy points at him, saying he’s right there, except he’s somewhat “airy.” She then exclaims, “Oh!” and realizes she’s witnessing Samson’s savvy. Gypsy is good at seeing things others overlook; perhaps that’s why she can see him, if only partially.
Panicked, Samson runs off to the hammock. On the way, he feels a strange surge of power. He wraps himself up in the hammock, which doesn’t disappear as the mail parcels did. Gypsy leads Mibs and Fish to Samson; they ask him, worriedly, if he’s ok. They put their hands on the hammock, preparing to stand guard over him. Grateful, he reaches out toward Fish, and his hand begins to reappear. He touches Mibs and feels his surge of power flow into her. It’s like when he touches others to calm them but much stronger. Becoming invisible, then, is when the power builds up. He has a double savvy.
As he reappears, he’s so relieved that he falls out of the hammock. His siblings reach down to him, but as they touch him, Fish suddenly creates a storm cloud, and Mibs shrieks that she can hear the thoughts of everyone all the way to New York. Samson stands up and stumbles into Rocket, who has just arrived for the birthday. At Samson’s touch, Rocket’s electric power shoots out in all directions and connects with Fish’s storm cloud, and lightning bolts strike the ground and shatter trees.
Samson thinks he’s done something terrible, but Mibs hears his thoughts. She hugs him fiercely and says he’s a good person and his savvy isn’t his fault. The power surge ends quickly. From the house, where the others are hiding, Grandpa calls out, “Ready for cake? […] Whooo-eee! Is this a birthday party, or is this a birthday party?” (347)
Inside, Samson hears crying. In the family room, he finds Fedora weeping. Her chin hurts from the fall she took on the porch. On a hunch, Samson talks her into playing a thumb war with him. They clasp hands, and Fedora immediately feels much better. She grins at him. Samson realizes he has done something good with his new double power: “It was a start” (347).
Addendum Analysis
The 10th-anniversary edition of Savvy contains a two-chapter addendum that takes place five years later. This time, Samson narrates as Mibs and Fish, now 19 and 20, return home for Samson’s 13th birthday. His savvy is an apt one: Samson is an introvert who loves people in small doses but prefers to be alone, and invisibility matches his personality. Its sudden arrival, though, startles and disorients him, and the ensuing chaos reveals that the boy has a second savvy that also fits him well, the ability to transfer empowering energy to others.
Both sides of Samson’s double savvy hinted at their existence during the boy’s childhood. Samson has always had an uncanny knack for disappearing, almost into thin air, from social gatherings; when he returns, his ability to calm and strengthen people with a single touch impresses his siblings, who have long since grown accustomed to his helpful presence. The double savvy is a huge increase in those two abilities.
“Five Years Later” can be read as a morality play that warns against the dangers of having too much power. The author approaches this mini-theme slyly: She foreshadows Samson’s savvy by mentioning his choice of reading material, H. G. Wells’s sci-fi classic The Invisible Man. It’s an appropriate book for a boy who’s an expert at disappearing and hiding. The Wells novel describes a mad scientist, Griffin, who invents a potion that makes him invisible; this gives him great power over others, which he uses to commit heinous crimes. It’s thus no wonder that Samson feels guilty when his savvy makes him invisible: The Wells novel has warned him of the danger, and his first thoughts are that he has somehow done something wrong.
It takes Mibs—who has gone through similar agonies of self-doubt—to assure him that the power he now wields doesn’t make him a bad person. Samson nonetheless wishes to remedy any harm he may have caused. His first stop is with Fedora, who injured herself stumbling over packages that invisible Samson dropped. He holds her hand and thereby transfers power that strengthens and calms her. Samson thus deliberately uses his power for good; he has no intention of becoming another Griffin. (A study guide for Wells’s The Invisible Man is available on SuperSummary’s website.)
The two Samson chapters effectively make up a short story that serves as bonus reading material and a teaser for the sequel novels.
