The Giver of Stars

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-23

Chapters 24-28

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Feminism

The Giver of Stars takes place in 1930s America while the country suffers from the effects of the Great Depression. At this time in the United States, women were second-class citizens, especially in rural locales like Kentucky. Though Alice initially imagines life in the United States as a glamorous pursuit of happiness, she soon learns that she’s expected to remain silent, submit to her husband Bennett, produce babies, and keep house. As Mr. Van Cleve reluctantly states after Alice agrees to work for the Pack Horse Library, “She could do it just till the babies come along” (26). The Pack Horse Library, not coincidentally, is championed by feminist icon Eleanor Roosevelt.

Margery O’Hare, despite being an independent woman and a mentor for Alice, finds herself in hot water after her independent way of living rubs people the wrong way. Margery refuses to marry her lover Sven, resisting the traditional notion of contractual marriage. The townsfolk assume Margery is as wicked as her father; they want her to stop acting like she has the same rights as men. Even Mrs. Brady, the staunch supporter of the library, upbraids Margery near the end of the narrative for putting the library in danger by her actions. This rebuke underscores how men set the rules in Baileyville and how women are expected to uphold the system.

Sophia Kenworth, a black woman, is even more marginalized. Despite Sophia’s routine description as beautiful, composed, organized, and as fiercely opinionated as any of the other women, she must maneuver her existence in Baileyville so as not to upset both white men and women. Sophia singlehandedly gets the library in working order and delivers Margery’s baby later in the narrative. Despite her accomplishments, she’s still viewed as expendable by the general public because of her race, but she bonds with the librarians and finds strength in shared adversity.

Family Trauma

Appalachia is a region known in literature and movies for its deadly blood feuds and poverty, as well as for traumatic instances of child neglect, child abuse, and spousal abuse. These horrific events all crop up in The Giver of Stars in one way or another, highlighting the harsh living environments of mountain people. At the end of the narrative, the town learns that one of Clem McCullough’s daughters is pregnant from incest (and rape). Moyes doesn’t explore this shocking account in detail, but it is an example of the trauma that many in the narrative carry around.

Margery eventually tells Alice about how her father, Frank, beat her and her brothers. He once knocked Margery out as a child and then dragged her upstairs until some of her hair came out. When he died, Margery didn’t mourn her father; when the townsfolk liken her to her father, they add insult to injury. When Margery faces imprisonment at the end of the novel, she begins to believe that she doesn’t deserve a reprieve. Her fate, linked to that of her family name, seems all but sealed. She is rescued by those outside her family: the other librarians and her partner, Sven. By the end of the book, she agrees to marry Sven and give the concept of family another try.

Back in England, Alice suffered the stigma of her parents’ disapproval. Now, no matter what she does—or what’s done to her—her parents blame her “wild spirit.” Mentally exhausted by their disapproval, she at first tries to work within the norms of the Van Cleve family. When Mr. Van Cleve beats her, she takes the autonomous step of moving out, and she finds a new sense of home and family with a man who treats her with kindness.

Greed and Corruption

Mr. Van Cleve makes his fortune from mining. He owns Hoffman Mining Company, a blight on the land. Hoffman’s described in the following terms:

For Margery, Hoffman was a vision of Hell, its pits eating into the scarred and hollowed-out hillsides around Baileyville, like giant welts, its men, their eyes glowing white out of blackened faces, emerging from its bowels, and the low industrial hum of nature being stripped and ravaged (81).

The conditions for workers are deplorable, but Mr. Van Cleve only cares about making money, going so far as to silence dissent and to meet talks of unionizing with brute force. Mr. Van Cleve crushes the spirits of his workers, and he gets rich off of their labor, even firing those who buy food not sold in the company store while inflating the prices of the company-store food.

When the town floods, Margery discovers that one of Hoffman’s slurries broke apart, meaning that tainted water mixed with toxic chemicals flooded the lower parts of town. Monarch Creek, a primarily African-American enclave where the poorest residents live, receives the brunt of the damage. Mr. Van Cleve, a man of means, simply goes away for a few days so that the town can’t direct anger at him. He also bribes local officials, including the governor and the sheriff, to get his way. The narrative underscores the effects of corruption by using a Theodore Dreiser quote to preface Chapter 15: “The small town bankers, grocers, editors and lawyers, the police, the sheriff, if not the government, were all apparently subservient to the money and corporate masters of the area” (231).

Corruption requires a populace that willingly remains silent. Mr. Van Cleve is the library’s primary nemesis, not only because of his personal vendetta against Margery but also because an uneducated populace tends to be more submissive to corrupt rule. The library represents change and intellectual freedom, growing parallel to the calls for unionization at his own mines. Only when the librarians revealed they had leverage over his family—Alice could have revealed that Bennett never consummated his marriage with her—did Mr. Van Cleve back off and leave them alone.