46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate DiCamilloThe Puppets of Spelhorst
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2023A 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
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaPart 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Act I”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death.
The book begins in a room above a tailor shop, where an old man named Spelhorst lives alone. He has “no wife, no children, no family” and spends the days when he feels sick in bed and the days when he feels well walking around the city (7). On one of the days when he is feeling well, Spelhorst sees a group of puppets hanging in a toy store window: “a king and a wolf and a girl and a boy and an owl” (9). He is captivated by the girl puppet, who reminds him of someone he used to love.
Spelhorst asks if he can buy the girl puppet, but the vendor tells him the puppets must remain together since they are in the same story. Spelhorst is confused by the comment but ultimately agrees. That night, he sits the girl on his desk and looks at her while putting the other puppets in a trunk with his name on it. As he looks at the girl puppet, he begins to cry and apologizes to her, calling her Annalise. He stays up for a long time to write a letter. When it grows dark outside, Spelhorst folds up the letter, puts it in the trunk, lies down, and cries himself to sleep.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
With the old man asleep, the puppets are free to talk to each other as the moon rises. The girl, who is the only one who can see the moon fully, describes it to her friends: “It’s like a loving face […] And it’s looking right at me. I feel as if it has been looking for me, for all of us” (17). The king and the wolf are both irritable with her. The king finds no value in the moon since he can neither hold nor command it. The wolf, meanwhile, keeps saying that she wants to destroy something with her sharp teeth.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
The tailor’s wife ventures upstairs that morning only to find that Spelhorst has died in his sleep. Misty-eyed, she takes in the sight of him and begins to weep. She looks at the girl puppet sitting on the table and is confused about what an old man would want with it.
The tailor comes up the stairs next and begins to rummage through the old man’s belongings in search of money. All he finds is “a single piece of neatly folded paper, along with a hat, several pairs of pants, some woolens, and of course, the puppets” (22). Annoyed at not finding anything more valuable, he throws the girl puppet into the trunk containing the other puppets and takes it downstairs.
That afternoon, he sells the trunk to a rag-and-bone man, who takes it without looking inside. As he travels to his next stop, he sings: “What you don’t want, I want. What you don’t want, someone wants. […] What you don’t want tells me who you are. Tell me, who are you?” (23). The puppets listen to this song all the way to their destination.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
As the puppets lie inside the trunk listening to the man’s song, they start to wonder who they are and what story they are in. Before long, the boy, the king, and the wolf start to fight with one another until the girl insists that they stop. She says, “We are here in the dark together. How will it help us to fight with one another?” (25). The girl’s words quiet them, and they continue to listen to the song.
The king speaks again, telling the others that this isn’t the first song he has heard. When he was being made and was waiting for his cloak and crown to be finished, he heard a woman singing. He recalls that the puppet maker stopped to listen and said, “It could break your heart in two, a song so beautiful” (26). The king tells the others that his heart felt broken too, so he has always remembered that moment.
The girl replies that the moon broke her heart with its beauty and that she is glad she got to see it. The wolf tells her she should have tried to capture the moon since “that’s the point—to capture, to subdue” (28). The owl challenges her thinking, but before the wolf can reply, the old man stops singing and parks his wagon.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
When the trunk lid is lifted, the puppets look into the face of the rag-and-bone man. He smiles a toothless smile at them and says. “[Y]ou are winsome pretties. You will be sold in no time” (30). He shouts out that there are puppets for sale, along with the chest that holds them. The wolf is annoyed at being called “winsome” and claims she is too ferocious and scary to be called such a thing.
Just then, a young man asks to look at the puppets. He gently sifts through the trunk, picking up the owl and commenting on how real his feathers look. The old man assures the young buyer that they are real. The young man buys the trunk, and the puppets are off to their next home.
The owl is distracted by the talk of his feathers. He remembers a time when he saw a real bird. The owl tells the others how the bird flew past the toy shop window once: “His feathers were as black as the inside of this chest, but they were also bright—dark and bright at the same time” (34). The owl doesn’t tell them that when he watched the bird fly, he felt a mixture of happiness and mourning simultaneously, which he couldn’t explain. All he knows is that he dreams of how marvelous it would feel to fly away.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
As the puppets are carried to their next stop on their journey, each of them begins to tell the others about their ambitions and hopes for their stories. The boy tells them, “When I was being made, […] I was told there was something waiting inside of me, that I had a destiny” (38); now, his “heart longs to do a great deed” (39). The boy puppet was given arrows, which he wears on his back, to remind him that he is destined for greatness.
The wolf speaks next, telling the other puppets about her dream of running through the woods. Even though she’s never been in the woods, she is certain that’s where she is in her dream: “There is snow on the ground, and there is snow falling from the sky. The trees are dark against the snow, and in my dream, I can run and run without ever feeling tired” (39). She recalls how alive she feels in her dream and how her teeth are truly sharp.
One by one, each of them expresses a moment or a wish that they cling to: the king’s memory of the beautiful song he heard, the boy’s desire to fulfill his destiny, the girl’s encounter with the moon, and the wolf’s dream of “chasing and being chased” at the same time (40). The boy reminds them that they are in a story together, not in separate stories.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
When the puppets arrive at their new home, they can hear the voices of two little girls outside of the trunk. Two sisters, Emma and Martha, lift the lid and peer into the trunk at the puppets, a gift from their uncle. Emma, the older of the two, is ecstatic at the group of puppets they’ve acquired and announces that they can put on a show with them. Martha is less enthused by the idea and pouts as Emma sets the new puppets gently on the mantel.
Martha, who immediately noticed the wolf’s sharp teeth, insists that the wolf is ferocious and doesn’t want to be in a play. Emma replies, “Don’t be silly, Martha. Everyone wants to be in a play. Everyone wants to be part of a story” (45). She looks at the puppets and says they’ll be back soon. Then the two girls leave, and the puppets are alone again.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
The puppets are bubbling with a mixture of excitement and worry. The girl is delighted that they will be in a play, and the wolf is pleased that Martha noted her sharp teeth. The king worries that his position is not recognized since no one held him up and said he was a king. The boy tries to assure him, saying, “You have a crown on your head […] they’ll figure it out” (47). Only the owl is quiet as time passes, and the room gets darker as snow begins to fall outside.
The puppets sit together in peace, watching the snow and, eventually, a bird that flies past the window. They know that their story is about to begin. Sure enough, Emma returns when night has fallen. She tells the puppets, “Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten you. I’ve read the letter and now I’m writing the play. It will be wonderous” (48). She studies their faces in the candlelight and tells them that each of them will have a part.
Part 1 Analysis
The first eight chapters of The Puppets of Spelhorst establish the characters of the five puppets. They each have a defining physical trait or accessory. The girl is known for her piercing violet eyes, and the boy is equipped with a bow and quiver with five arrows inside. The owl is made of real feathers, and the wolf has a set of sharp teeth, of which she is extremely proud. Finally, the king has a crown that sets him apart as royalty, something he doesn’t let the others forget. These attributes render the characters distinct for young readers, but they also suggest the puppets’ archetypal status—e.g., the boy as an adventurous youth, the wolf as a predator, etc. Though the novel will add nuance to these archetypes as the story progresses, the presence of recognizable character types hints at The Transformative Power of Stories. Moreover, it foreshadows important parallels between the puppets and the frame story (e.g., between the girl puppet and Spelhorst’s beloved), suggesting the relevance of stories to everyday life.
These chapters also dive into each of the puppets’ individual dreams. When they begin their journey from owner to owner, they do not know what their purposes are and have their own ideas about what would give them a meaningful life. They each state what they want from (or admire in) life in Chapter 6:
‘The puppet maker told me that I would do something important,’ said the boy.
‘I saw a bird in flight,’ said the owl.
‘I heard the most beautiful song that has ever been sung,’ said the king.
‘I saw the moon rise,’ said the girl. ‘The moon and I were face to face.’
‘In my dream,’ said the wolf, ‘I am chasing and being chased, both things at the same time’ (40).
This passage gives readers a more explicit understanding of the characters’ motivations, making it easier to track each puppet’s individual arc. These desires not only reflect the puppet’s goals in the book but the goals of the characters they will eventually portray in Emma’s play, underscoring the blurry boundaries between life and fiction.
Indeed, while the puppets have individual ideas about what their lives will entail, the only thing they all know for certain is that they are in a story together. This was told to Spelhorst when he first buys them, and when nothing feels safe or predictable, this is what the puppets will remind themselves. This reinforces the framing of life as a kind of story, but it also speaks to the theme of The Importance of Community in Hard Times, as the story is one they share. Even this early in the book, the puppets face uncertainty as they move from home to home, but the girl puppet tries to remind them of the toy seller’s words to give them comfort and courage.
Complicating the emphasis on community is the fact that, although the five puppets find themselves thrown together on this adventure, they don’t all get along. The wolf is constantly talking about her sharp teeth, which the boy finds annoying. The king tries to command the other puppets to no avail. The owl feels like his words are overlooked, and the girl wishes that they would try to make peace with one another. The characters start the book in a place of disharmony and move toward harmony throughout the novel. This establishes one of the major conflicts of the play, which centers on the decision to pursue life alone or to find contentment in community.
This tension also emerges through the contrasting example of Spelhorst, who chose isolation. Spelhorst has “no wife, no children, no family. He [is] alone in the world” (7). On days when his body doesn’t ache all over, he walks the streets of town, but on bad days, he spends his time in bed, staring at the ceiling and speaking to no one. Only the tailor’s wife weeps when he passes away, for no one else is around to know that he lived, much less that he died. The story thus emphasizes the depths of Spelhorst’s loneliness and begins to hint at the reasons for it: After staring at the girl puppet for a long time, he says to her, “I am sorry. I am sorry, Annalise. I am sorry” (13). This is the first reference to the name Annalise, but it foreshadows the later revelation that he abandoned his sweetheart to travel the world (equally important to the narrative is the letter he writes after this, which he places in the trunk with his name on it, as it inspires Emma’s play).
The theme of Love Without Regret also begins to emerge through the girl’s description of the beauty of the room in the moonlight. The boy is grateful to see at least part of it from his place in the trunk, to which the owl says, “Often, […] a part of a thing is greater than the whole of it” (19). This quote refers in part to the fact that Spelhorst’s brief time with his love was greater than the whole of his life, most of which he spent seeking glory and fame. More broadly, the moon, along with other celestial bodies such as the sun and the stars, is a motif related to dreams, as well as to the wonder and mystery of life. The author personifies the moon and the sun in these chapters. For instance, the girl puppet says the moon is like a beautiful face that is “looking right at [her] […] looking for [her], for all of [the puppets]” (17), whereas the sun is “more insistent, more certain of its power” (20). The suggestion that the moon has been “looking for” the puppets signals that, freed from the toyshop, they can now experience the full richness of life.
These chapters also establish the motif of songs, especially in relationship to the king puppet. The king puppet tells the others that when he was being made, he heard a song for the first time and felt like his heart would break. He has always been deeply affected by music, and when he has his own kingdom, he wants people to sing all the time. The novel also incorporates lyrics—e.g., the rag-and-bone man sings about people throwing out things that to him are treasures. This motif of music is related to the novel’s interest in storytelling; the king’s words, for instance, reflect the power of stories to move those who hear them.
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By Kate DiCamillo
