Blended

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-17

Chapters 18-29

Chapters 30-44

Chapters 45-59

Chapters 60-77

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Chapters 1-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-17 Summary

Izzy begins her story seated at the piano. At 11 years of age, after more than eight years of piano lessons, Isabella “Izzy” Badia Thornton is fascinated by the music she produces at the keyboard: “I can create any musical combination of sounds at my piano” (1). She dreams of being a concert pianist. She responds to the magical sounds of chords and the intricate cooperation of left and right hands, black and white keys, that produces a single grand sound. If only her life, she wishes, was as harmonic.

Izzy is biracial; her father is Black, and her mother is white. She recalls the tensions in her house growing up: fights between her parents that seemed to her to be about nothing. When she was eight, her parents divorced. The two parents both loved Izzy, but their personalities were so opposite the divorce was a relief. Isaiah, Izzy’s father, is a straight-laced corporate lawyer with a specialty in investment banking. He preaches tirelessly to Izzy about how white people look at Black people differently. Her mother, Nicole, is more free-spirited. She works as a server at Waffle House. After the divorce, her father lived for a time in California before he returned to Cincinnati. The parents worked out a custody agreement in which Izzy spends alternate weeks with each parent.

The two parents could not be more different. Isaiah frets over his clothes, even neatly irons his jeans. Nicole wears pastel t-shirts and rainbow-colored leggings. Isaiah drives a Mercedes, Nicole a battered Chevy. At her father’s, Izzy practices on a Steinway grand piano; at her mother’s, she plays a Casio electronic keyboard. She notes the difficulty of the dual custody: “Yeah, they love me and all that, but it doesn’t stop them from slicing my life in half every seven days and then acting like it’s normal or something” (18). The hand-offs, every Sunday at the mall, are always curt, quick, and tight-lipped. Izzy describes the meetings as “Chocolate family meets vanilla family” (23).

Both parents are involved in new relationships. Her father is living with his girlfriend, an interior decorator and widow named Anastasia, and her son, Darren, a junior in high school. Izzy’s mother is seeing John Mark Metzker, a folksy, down-to-earth manager of a bowling alley. Izzy enjoys time at the bowling alley with John Mark, but she also enjoys the time she spends at her father’s house. She sees Darren as a kind of older brother, someone she can talk to. He is an accomplished athlete and an honor roll student who volunteers at a homeless shelter on weekends. He is already being sought by an array of schools, including Harvard. Izzy compares her weeks on and off to getting whiplash from an amusement park ride. What is constant in her life is school and her friends, particularly a Black girl named Imani, who is outspoken about the importance of her racial identity in a school full of small-minded, bigoted white kids.

Izzy is preparing for a major piano recital in three months that will be held on the campus of the University of Cincinnati. She is working on Muzio Clementi’s Sonata in C major, a complicated piece that demands intricate fingering and precise dynamics. She practices every day. She is hard on herself; “every mistake,” she acknowledges, “echoes like thunder” (44).

When a teacher asks the class to write an essay entitled “The Real Me,” Izzy is initially perplexed. A child of divorce, with blended racial identity, she is not entirely sure who she is, especially, she says, because “there’s pretty much two of me” (33). In her essay, she uses her two names, Isabella from her mother’s side and Badia from her father’s, to assert that she is exactly that, two in one: Isabella Badia Thornton. Later, after a luxurious shower at her father’s house, she studies her naked body in the mirror, trying to find some identifying feature, trying to connect the grand-sounding name Isabella Badia Thornton to the scrawny girl in the mirror with her mismatched parts, caramel-colored skin, freckles, stubby nose, and thick, curly hair. She is a little bit her father, a little bit her mother. Like the custody arrangement, she is “split exactly in half” (63).

Chapters 1-17 Analysis

These chapters focus on division. They introduce Izzy as a child uncertain of her identity and who feels at war with herself. Because her parents are so opposite in their personalities, their professions, and their lifestyles, Izzy, shuttled between the two, finds defining herself difficult. In these early chapters, the best Izzy can do is see herself as a kind of half-and-half child. Her examination of her body in the mirror after her shower at her father’s home indicates the psychological dimension of her identity crisis. As she examines herself in the mirror, she sees bits of both sides of her family in a sort of mismatched quilted effect: “I got my Mom’s freckles and her fingers […] but I’ve got the thickness and curliness of my Dad’s dark hair” (60). She continues with the inventory, assigning first her nose, then her lips, then her oddly curled ears, her crooked smile, and down to her bony legs.

The divorce settlement aggravates the sense of division. She loves the luxury and elegant appointments of her Dad’s residence, particularly the gorgeous Steinway. But she feels on her best behavior, careful what she says and how she acts and even how she eats. Her time with her mother is relaxed and laidback. Hers is less a house and more a home, with clutter, mismatched furniture, and meals of hot dogs and Jell-O. Despite her piano keyboard telling her how black and white harmonize and create melody, her life tells her, at least at this point, just the opposite.

This sense of internal division is further stressed by Izzy’s school essay that focuses on her “awesome” name, Isabella Badia Thornton, which she rhapsodizes “flows like the music of a waterfall” (34). The grand-sounding name, however, becomes an occasion to riff on her divided identity. The name Isabella, she writes, comes from her mother’s side and represents to Izzy a character from some fairy tale walking on a “sandy beach where the wind is blowing her perfect blond hair” (35). Badia is an African name that translates loosely as “one of a kind.” Izzy loves the grandness of the three names and imagines her name emblazoned on concert programs when she is a famous pianist. For now, however, Izzy sees she needs to grow into the name and to find a way to celebrate both of her identities.

These opening chapters also reveal Izzy’s difficult adjustments to her parents’ custody agreement as an additional element of her divided sensibility. When her father relocates to distant California immediately after the divorce, Izzy pines away, missing her father. When he returns to Cincinnati and Izzy assumes that now she will happily have her father back in her life, she finds out that nearness and proximity do not help but rather further divide her already split identity. She sees herself a refugee, moving endlessly between destinations. Not only do her parents maintain opposite lifestyles, but the hand-offs themselves underscore the tension of division rather than any sense of cooperation and communication. The meetings at the mall to hand off Izzy from one parent to the other are occasions for stress. Both parents fret over being even a few minutes late. Their conversations are curt, their facial expressions tight and unemotional. It is rare the handoff is uneventful, “no fireworks, no ugly words, just the exchange” (60). As these opening chapters close, Izzy testifies to this quiet agony of being essentially homeless, of being both and yet neither, a part of and yet apart from both her loving parents: “[N]ow I don’t really feel like I have a home—it’s more like I live at Dad’s place. Or Mom’s place. I never say ‘I’m going home’ anymore” (61).

Finally, Izzy’s intricate recital piece reflects this division. Izzy did not choose the piece herself. Her teacher selected it certain that mastering this piece would impress those at the recital in a position to further Izzy’s ambitions to be a pianist. The late Baroque piece, very much an expression of European—that is, white—culture, is precise, mathematical, and demanding, with careful fingering and rigid counting. The practices are difficult. Izzy follows her fingers and counts to herself, aware of the precise nature of the piece. She cringes over slips. It is as if she is apart from herself. The discipline of mastering the piece splits her. Only later, when her soon-to-be stepmother introduces her to the music of her Black heritage, will Izzy understand why she feels so alienated from her own fingers and her own performance.