46 pages • 1 hour read
Jo Watson HacklSmack Dab in the Middle of Maybe
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A 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 1-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “February Firehouse Jubilee Fish Fry”
Cricket is in Thelma’s Cash ’n’ Carry with her Aunt Belinda and cousins. She is thinking about her parents: her father, who is dead, and her mother, who is gone. Aunt Belinda is in a hurry to get everything she needs to prepare for the February Firehouse Jubilee Fish Fry. She gets a phone call, but when Cricket asks who it was, she dodges the question.
Cricket finds a cricket bug in the store. She tries to release it outside, but one of her cousins blocks her; it seems like he wants to kill the cricket. Cricket goes to the bathroom to try and let the cricket out a window. While she tries to get the energetic cricket out the window, she decides to name it Charlene, which is her mother’s middle name. After a struggle in which she fails to release Charlene outside, she returns to the store. She finds the store empty and dark. Cricket has been left behind.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Fresh Meat”
Aunt Belinda’s car is gone. Cricket finds a note on the ground that Aunt Belinda wrote while she was on the phone. It says “GAG–Wed. 3:30, Cricket pack” (22). GAG is a nickname for Cricket’s relative, Great-Aunt Genevieve, whom Cricket dislikes. Cricket realizes that Aunt Belinda was planning to send her to live with Genevieve. She worries that if this happens, she will “never make it back in time for Mama” (22). She decides to hide in the woods. She has everything important to her with her already, but she is nervous because she has never been to the woods alone. Cricket gathers some food and supplies from the store and uses her money to pay for as much of it as she can. She and Charlene leave the store, ready to “go get Mama back” (25).
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Other Side”
Cricket and Charlene walk to the woods without being noticed. As she walks, Cricket thinks about how her mother used to meander through the woods, noticing each beautiful detail.
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Hundred and Fifty Years of Dark”
The woods are the site of a ghost town called Electric City. Electric City used to be a company town for the Electric Lumber Company. The people who worked for the company lived in Electric City with their families. There was a theater, a park, a library, a school, a general store, and even a teaching hospital. People in the town used their own currency, called a doogaloo, which was minted by the company. Cricket’s father grew up in Electric City before the company failed and took the town with it. Now, only some ruins and cement sidewalks edged in quartz are left. Cricket stops at a ginkgo tree.
Chapter 5 Summary: “No Matter What”
In the ginkgo tree is a treehouse that Cricket and her father built together. The treehouse is waterproofed, and its windows have shutters. Cricket thinks about her grandmother, who died last summer. A few months later, her mama ran away, and just over 20 days later, Cricket’s father died of a blood clot at the age of 38.
Cricket’s mother disappeared at the end of December, but she left a note promising to return on March 1, when the headstone for Cricket’s grandmother’s grave is set to be delivered. In the note, she said that she was “off looking for [her] birds” (38). Cricket knows that her mother is looking for what she called the “Bird Room.” Cricket wants to prove that the room is real so that her mother will stay with her for good. March 1 is 11 days away, so Cricket believes that she has 11 days to prove the Bird Room is real.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Bird Room”
Cricket recalls the night of her seventh birthday. Her Mama told her a story about her own seventh birthday. She accompanied her father on an electrician job to a fancy house in which she saw a magical room. The room had “birds dancing on the walls, moving in the light” (42). A man in paint-spattered clothes introduced himself as Bob and invited Mama into the room so she could look closer at the birds. Her favorite was a scarlet tanager, which migrates south for the winter and changes the colors of its feathers in the fall. Bob gave her a present: the first clue in a series of puzzles. He told her that if she solved the puzzles, she would find a buried treasure.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Electric Doogaloo”
The clue that Bob gave Mama was a small, round painting, about the size of a coin. The painting was faint, but it showed a red tanager. Mama explained to Cricket that she never solved the clue or saw the Bird Room again, and that her own parents did not believe that the room could be real. Mama believes that Cricket can solve the mystery.
While she was staying with Aunt Belinda, one of Cricket’s cousins set off a firecracker in her bed, damaging the paint on the painting. The paint flaked away, revealing a doogaloo. Cricket realized that the Bird Room must have something to do with the old ghost town.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Woods Time”
Cricket sets up her treehouse as “a clue-finding base camp” (49). She rations out her food and makes a cozy bed for Charlene. She makes a fire outside beside the treehouse. After eating dinner, Cricket gets out her father’s book about surviving in the woods. In the book, her father wrote that when she turned 13, they were going to have “Woods Time Together” (52). This moves Cricket: she is not yet 13, and her father is dead, but she is having woods time now.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Thick Dark”
Cricket wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of coyotes howling. She hears Charlene chirping and wonders if she is also missing someone. The next morning, Cricket begins her hunt for more clues about the Bird Room. She walks around the ghost town but finds nothing. She remembers that her grandma always loved mysteries and clues, and Cricket decides to go ask her for help.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”
Cricket visits the cemetery where her grandma is buried. Her grandma tried to make Mama promise her two things: to stay on her medication and to “buy [her] a proper headstone” (60). Mama did not keep her first promise: She flushed her medication down the toilet. However, she did design Grandma an intricate headstone, and Cricket believes that she will be there when it is installed.
At the grave, Cricket holds out the doogaloo and asks her grandma for help. A red cardinal lands nearby, which Cricket takes as a sign from Grandma. She starts examining all the gravestones that she passes and eventually finds one with the initials SW. There is a rock propped against the headstone. On closer inspection, Cricket sees a feather carved into the rock.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Clue-Sprouts”
Beneath the feather, Cricket sees some writing, but she cannot make out what it says. Nevertheless, she is excited that she has found another clue. Hungry, Cricket forages for food. She finds bamboo shoots, which her mother sometimes ate with peanut sauce. As she harvests the shoots, she looks up and sees “an unblinking wood eye” (67) staring at her.
Chapter 12 Summary: “A Wing and a Prayer”
The eye turns out to be the eye of a tanager that has been carved into the side of a tree. Cricket hopes this clue means that the Bird Room is real. She examines the carving more closely and sees the words “Worthy #3” carved just beneath the tanager. This does not mean anything to Cricket, but she reasons that if there is a Worthy #3, there must also be a #1 and a #2.
Chapters 1-12 Analysis
The setting of Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe is not quite aligned with reality. The story takes place around the time that it was published (in a later chapter, it is revealed to take place more than 30 years after 1984), but Cricket’s father grew up in Electric City before the town died. He was 38 when he died, which means that Electric City likely closed down some time in the 1980s. Electric Mills, the real company town that Electric City is based on, became a ghost town around 1941, more than 40 years earlier. Most American company towns died long before the 1980s. If they did survive, they usually either diversified their economies or were folded into larger cities. Because doogaloos are a form of company scrip, Electric City could not have used them any later than 1938, when scrip was banned in the United States. These anachronisms are not discussed in the text.
Cricket’s mother’s mental illness is never named. Her mood is volatile, and she has some mild delusions: She believes that the paintings in the Bird Room are literally alive, not just lifelike. Cricket feels The Impact of Mental Illness keenly since her family has fallen apart in recent months. Her grandmother and her father have died, and her mother has abandoned her again. In these chapters, Cricket sees her mother in a rosy light. She focuses on happy memories, like her seventh birthday party and building the treehouse. She has not thought deeply about why her mother behaves the way she does, but she knows that her mother needs medication.
Although Cricket is upset that her parents are gone, she still holds tight to the useful things they both taught her. Her mother taught her the importance of Observing the Beauty of the World. Cricket takes this instruction seriously and becomes a keen observer of the woods. Taking time to see the beauty of the world helps Cricket notice things that help her survive, like the bamboo shoots. It is also a crucial skill that allows her to solve the first few clues in the puzzle. She notices the tanager in the tree, for instance, because she is watching her environment closely. Cricket is also able to see the beauty in Charlene: Her cousin wants to kill the insect, but Cricket wants to keep her safe. She often remarks on Charlene’s expressive antennae and big eyes and considers her to be a friend during her time in the woods.
Cricket is primarily motivated by her intense Familial Love and Devotion. Her greatest desire is to be reunited with Mama, even if she must survive alone in the woods to make that reunion happen. She is prepared to live in a treehouse and attempt to solve a decades-old mystery though she has no idea if the Bird Room exists or not. Cricket loves her mother even though her behavior can be difficult to understand and cope with. She also loves and thinks of her father often. It is clear he loved her very much while he was alive: His book details his plans to teach her more about the wilderness though he never got the chance. His book is an invaluable resource for Cricket as she spends time in the woods, so he is still helping her from beyond the grave. Despite her absence, Cricket’s mother also exemplifies familial devotion. She thinks it is of the utmost importance to be present when her mother’s headstone is installed at the cemetery even though she cannot be present for her daughter in the meantime.
Aunt Belinda provides a counterpoint to this theme. She is not Cricket’s blood relative—she is Cricket’s uncle’s ex-wife—and she does not seem to love Cricket the way she cares for her own children. At the beginning of the book, Aunt Belinda does not notice that she is leaving Cricket behind at the grocery store. Though she did agree to take Cricket in, she does not intend to keep her, instead hoping to send her to another relative’s house. The relationship between Cricket and Belinda is strained at best, so Cricket hopes that a better resolution is around the corner.
