44 pages • 1 hour read
Adrienne YoungThe Unmaking of June Farrow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | 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.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to murder and death by suicide.
June Farrow attends the funeral of her grandmother, Margaret, who she lived with since infancy, when she was found in an alley after her mother’s disappearance. Margaret, like all women in the family, was affected by a curse, and her service is not well attended. Margaret’s next-door neighbor is Ida Pinckney, and her oldest friend is Birdie Forester, who has been living with June and Margaret. When they return home from the service, Birdie gives June a locket watch that has been passed through the family. June repeatedly sees a man she knows isn’t there, first at the funeral and then on the porch. The man is eventually revealed to be her father, Nathaniel Rutherford. June thinks about the “madness” she knows is coming for her and her intention to ensure that the curse ends with her.
Chapter 2 Summary
June sets to work in the family flower farm, which has been in operation for more than 100 years. She thinks about how the family curse affected her mother and grandmother differently. She also thinks about her close friendship with Mason, who she has known since childhood and who runs the flower shop. She hasn’t let their connection become more than a friendship because they “both kn[o]w what [is] coming” (17).
As she makes a delivery to the flower shop, June hears a song on the radio, which persists even upon changing the channel. At home, she notices blood in the sink when she washes her hands, though there’s no injury. She adds both incidents to a journal she’s been keeping to log “episodes.” She finds a letter from Margaret, postmarked two days before her death, with a photograph labeled “Nathaniel Rutherford and wife, 1911” (25). June recognizes Nathaniel as a minister who had been murdered years earlier. Beside him, she is shocked to see her mother, Susanna.
Chapter 3 Summary
June consults a box in the basement where she stores her research on her mother’s disappearance. She retrieves a photo of her mother to compare it to the one her grandmother sent and finds the women to be identical.
Chapter 4 Summary
June asks Birdie about Nathaniel and finds that she “hit a nerve” (40). Then, she does some more research, with Ida’s help. She finds her mother’s name, Susannah Farrow, on a 1911 certificate of marriage to Nathaniel.
Chapter 5 Summary
June visits Dr. Jennings, who cared for her grandmother and has been assessing her episodes for patterns and triggers, as well as performing regular blood tests. She visits the church to try to find a record of the Susanna Farrow in the photo. While there are no records, the minister tells her Nathaniel’s wife died young, by suicide, after the couple lost a baby. She is shocked to find that the baby was called June and was reported to have died the same day of the year she herself was found in the alley, at the same age.
Chapter 6 Summary
Unable to find an explanation for her mother’s appearance in 1911, June wonders if she had “somehow slipped into the past” (64). She reviews the research and her notebook of hallucinations. Mason arrives, and she tells him what’s been happening.
Chapter 7 Summary
The next morning, Birdie arrives home early from a trip to Charlotte. Seeing the research about Susanna, she asks June how many times she has seen the door. Surprised that Birdie knows about the door she has been seeing, June asks for more details. Birdie tells her she has kept the secret for years. She can’t say more, only that June must open the door the next time she sees it. Birdie gives June an envelope, which contains an address, a pressed flower, and a note reading “Trust me.”
Chapter 8 Summary
June goes to the address on Hayward Gap Road, which features an old farmhouse and fields. She has an eerie feeling that she knows the place and experiences something she remembers her grandmother describing, of being “in two places at once” (86). As she drives away, she sees the red door and decides to walk through it. She walks into another time and turns to find that the door is gone.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
Young explores Misogyny and Mob Behavior in the Small Town, a key theme, in describing Jasper, North Carolina. The town is significant, acting as a character in its own right, a collective that judges the Farrow women. Young evokes the town’s harshness through description. Its menace is suggested by the river, “which cut[s] through the land like the scrape of a knife” (6). In this way, the river is accorded agency.
Young describes Jasper as familiar and intimate to its inhabitants. For example, Jasper’s citizens make up their own way of describing unused street names. The town is both ominous and quaint. Elements of Jasper remain the same in both time periods, anchoring June.
Young builds suspense about the Farrow family curse by slowly divulging information. The narrative gradually reveals details as June experiences the curse’s symptoms. Imagery characterizes her experience. Visually, June describes Margaret as fading and disappearing, the “light in her eyes all but flickering out” (16). Her perception opposes Margaret’s own experience of simply being in two places at once.
Duality permeates descriptions of the curse. June describes the curse as feeling like “two sides of film placed one over the other. Like an overlap that got clearer and more real each time it happened” (24). This evokes photography, a key motif in the novel, and provides a visual sense of being in two places at once.
June experiences the curse as auditory, such as when hearing Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Her experiences are also tactile, such as when feeling Eamon’s arms around her in bed. June describes her hallucinations as “a hollowed-out, floating feeling, like the meandering path a single dandelion seed takes through the air before it eventually lands” (48). These experiences foreshadow the moment when June goes through the door into the past. She initially realizes she has traveled through time due to small details about the physical setting and the way they deviate from the reality she’d just left: “Behind me, I could feel the crumbling house and the gray sky. I could sense the cooler air and the empty road. But there, in front of me, was another world. The hills were greener, the sky bluer” (86). In this passage, Young uses parallel introductory clauses—“Behind me” and “But there”—to contrast the world June has left with the one she has just entered. These differences are subtle and highlight how a small-town setting is unchanging in spite of time.
Throughout this section of the novel, June is characterized through her first-person narration and how she responds to new information about her mother and the curse. In spite of her wish for intimacy and family, she is committed to not having a family or children to end the curse. This provides a foundation for her character trajectory, as she eventually opens herself up to romantic relationships and finds another way to break the curse’s hold.
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