53 pages • 1 hour read
Neal ShustermanEverlost
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Neal Shusterman
Neal Shusterman was born on November 12, 1962, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He uses his knowledge of this area to add depth and authenticity to the world of Everlost and to describe Nick’s and Allie’s adventures in the Big Apple. Shusterman is now a New York Times best-selling author of over 30 novels with audiences ranging from children to teens and adults. He published his first novel in 1989, but his most celebrated novel is Unwind (2007), which has been adopted into the Language Arts curricula of many schools and has won over 30 national and international awards. For example, Challenger Deep won the 2015 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In 2017, Scythe won the 2017 Michael L. Printz Honor book and is currently being adapted into a film, as are several other novels. Shusterman currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
Shusterman does not limit himself to just writing novels. He has also created numerous party games, directed films, composed music, and written stage plays. Shusterman’s expansive creativity stems from his degrees in psychology and theatre, and he uses his skills as an engaging public speaker at schools and conferences. When Shusterman writes, he likes to incorporate sensitive issues. One way he weaves this element into Everlost is when Nick and Allie see the Twin Towers in Manhattan for the first time. Allie is upset that the Afterlights play at the base of the towers, finding it disrespectful to those who died, but another Afterlight teaches her that the children honor the 9/11 tragedy by bringing happiness back to that place. Likewise, he references the Hindenburg tragedy at the end of the novel, showing how the Afterlights use the ill-fated machine for good in a world where, far from being destroyed, its existence is honored and immortalized.
Literary Context: Skinjacker Trilogy
The Skinjacker trilogy includes Everlost (2006), Everwild (2009), and Everfound (2011). Each novel creatively incorporates real places and historical events such as 9/11, which appears in Everlost, and the World Columbian Exhibition of 1893 (a World’s Fair held in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World), which occurs in Everwild. By incorporating real places and events into each novel, Shusterman provides multiple ways for readers to relate personally to the text and better understand what living in a spirit world superimposed on the living world might be like. Everlost focuses on introducing the rules of this alternate world and initiating Allie and Nick’s journey, which Shusterman continues and resolves in the following two novels.
Everwild follows Allie as she returns home, accompanied by Mikey (formerly the monster called the McGill). Her goal is to find her parents and put her own soul to rest. On the way, Allie meets other skinjackers and discovers that skinjackers are considered neither dead nor alive, and that she must choose whether to return to the living world or remain a skinjacker in the world of Everlost. The novel also describes Nick’s desire to save all the Afterlights from Mary Hightower, who wants to trap them in Everlost forever and use them to build her own personal army. To this end, Mary acquires a ghost-version of the ill-fated Hindenburg and uses it to spread propaganda amongst Everlost’s Afterlight population—including labeling Nick as the Chocolate Ogre to scare other Afterlights away from him. Traveling beyond the boundaries of New York, she rallies more Afterlights, including the skinjackers, to her side. At the novel’s end, Mary falls through a vortex into the real world. Her skinjackers blow up a bridge in the living world, allowing her army to cross over, too. Mary then asks one of the skinjackers to kill her so she can return to Everlost.
In Everfound, Mary sleeps in a glass coffin for a time, and her leading skinjacker, Milos, takes her and her followers west on a train, where he and his gang intentionally skinjack teens to kill them and bring them to Everlost in an attempt to recruit more followers for Mary. Milos ties Allie to the front of the train, and Nick travels with Mickey until a monster called a scar wraith traps them. Nick manages to get away, but Mikey remains trapped. Milos causes the train to derail. An Afterlight helps Allie escape, and Avalon, the leader of a band of Afterlights called the Neon Nightmares, takes Mary and the other sleeping Afterlights to Alamo. Nick finds the derailed train, and Mary’s followers twist his memory to make him forget Allie, then head to Alamo to get Mary back. Allie returns to the train and follows Nick’s footprints. Mary wakes up and reunites with her followers. In the City of Souls in Mexico, Allie, Nick, and Mikey fight to send most of Mary’s Afterlights into the light and Mary into the center of the Earth. Allie skinjacks her body in order to live again, and Mikey enters the light, moving into the next stage of existence as all spirits are meant to. Nick stays behind in Everlost to become the Afterlights’ new leader and help them to enter the light.
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