93 pages • 3 hours read
Margaret Peterson HaddixFound
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008A 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.
Themes
Who Am I?
This question comes up throughout the book. From Chapter 1, Jonah experiences some minimal curiosity about where he came from and “who” he “really” is. He knows he was not born Jonah Skidmore, but the questions never bothered him much. He has a loving family and a good life, so he has no need to wonder. When Chip learns he was adopted, he is the first character to express the desire to know who he is. Unlike Jonah, the idea of being adopted angers and frightens Chip, and he is willing to do whatever it takes to find answers.
As the mystery of the notes starts to unfold, Jonah finds himself wondering more about where he came from. Chip’s burning curiosity acts as an emotional catalyst for Jonah. Jonah’s own curiosity piques at the meeting with James Reardon, who refuses to disclose information about where Jonah came from. Jonah is no longer contented with not knowing, even though he pretends not to care for several more chapters.
When Jonah, Chip, and Katherine meet with Angela, the idea of Jonah and Chip are from another time is introduced. Jonah can no longer ignore the question of where or when he came from. He still has a loving family, but his life has been irreversibly disrupted. In Chapter 30, Jonah and Chip learn they are from the past and led lives they do not remember because their ages were reversed and they were accidentally brought to the 21st century. They and the other kids from the plane in the prologue are not who they believed themselves to be. In Chapter 32, Angela tells Jonah what her life was supposed to be like before time messed it up. Her confession makes Jonah hope that time got messed up for him too. After several chapters of wondering where he came from, Jonah wishes he never found out. He realizes he liked being Jonah Skidmore and does not want a different identity.
Katherine also wonders who she is, concluding it is a natural occurrence for all kids, not just adopted one. She is getting older and needs to make important decisions about which activities to pursue and what things to concern herself with. Though she is not adopted, Katherine wonders about herself as much as Jonah or Chip, if in a different way. Kids do not have to be adopted to wonder about who they are or who they will be.
Trusting Oneself and Others
Throughout the story, Jonah, Chip, and Katherine struggle with who to trust and whether they can trust themselves. From the first letter Jonah receives in the mail, he questions whether the sender can be trusted. When Jonah learns James Reardon is associated with his and Chip’s adoption cases, Jonah hopes to trust Reardon and get answers. However, Reardon turns out to be untrustworthy.
Jonah’s major trust issues begin. As strange things begin to happen around him, he refuses to trust that they are real. When Katherine claims she saw a man appear and disappear during the meeting with Reardon, Jonah does not believe her. Seeing his name on the list of survivors shakes Jonah, threatening the trust he has in his reality. He knows Chip and Katherine dedicated to uncovering things he does not want to know, so he avoids the investigation to make his life feel normal. After meeting Angela, when Jonah witnesses JB and Gary appearing from nowhere, the conference room somehow returning normal after the fight, and Angela disappearing, Jonah struggles to believe what he saw. Slowly, he realizes he is not crazy and begins to trust himself. Now believing that Katherine saw someone appear and disappear in Reardon’s office, Jonah takes a more active role in the investigation. Once Jonah trusts himself, Katherine, and Chip, the three work as a better team.
Jonah’s relationship with Katherine grows as they develop trust throughout the story. In the beginning, Jonah distrusts Katherine the way older brothers often do with their younger sisters. He thinks Katherine is annoying and weird. But, during the fight in the time hollow, Jonah does not think twice about trusting Katherine. By that point, he knows he can count on her because she is his family. In the face of everything else Jonah has not been able to trust, Katherine remains steadfast and loyal.
Jonah does not want to trust Angela when the group meets her. In the ending chapters, JB and Angela stand at odds with Hodge and Gary about where the kidnapped kids should go; the former wanting them to return to the past and the latter wanting to take them to the future. Jonah trusts Angela, the only one who, like him, does not have the power to change the situation. He does not want to trust the men, but he knows he has to place his trust in someone so he can leave the time hollow.
The issue of trust does not only refer to people. In Chapter 21, Jonah remembers JB’s warning about things that could be monitored. Jonah realizes that he cannot trust writing things down. Written records are vulnerable to infiltration via time travel. Similarly, phone calls and computers are easily compromised. Jonah, Katherine, and Chip must rely on their conversations and thoughts to figure out what is going on. Reaching out for help would only put them in greater danger.
In the cave, the adults present arguments for why the kids should choose the future or past. The other kids trust Jonah to decide, but he does not trust himself with such a monumental choice. When the kids are sorted into one group, Jonah is positive that trusting the conference itself was a mistake. However, his initial trust turns out to be helpful. Without the conference, Jonah may have never been armed with the Elucidator, and he may have never gotten the opportunity to remain Jonah Skidmore with the family he loves.
Newfound Truths Versus Long-Standing Beliefs
Several things Jonah believes he understands at the beginning of the book turn out not to be true by the end. Early in the story’s conflict, Jonah takes a history quiz and feels comfort in knowing the answers. The quiz is one of the only moments where answers are clear and sensible. Jonah discovers that everything he thinks he knows about himself is false. He also learns that the world does not work the way he was been taught.
Because Jonah has always known he was adopted, he never gave it much thought. It is not until Chip makes such a big deal out of his own adoption that Jonah starts to question where he might have come from. The meeting with James Reardon presents more questions than answers, compounded by the information in the file, and Jonah leaves feeling uneasy. First, he thinks he came from another country, but he eventually learns he came from the past. Similarly, Jonah’s past is nothing like what he believed. He always assumed he spent a few months as a baby waiting for new parents. At the end of the story, he learns his past life was erased from his memory. So, Jonah knows neither who he was before nor what the life he lived prior to being Jonah Skidmore was like. The same goes for Chip and the other 34 kids from the plane.
Time also works differently than how Jonah always believed. At the beginning of the book, Jonah understands time as a line that everyone moves along. As the mystery unfolds, he learns that travel backward and forward through time is possible. Jonah sees Angela disappear, and his brain has difficulty processing the event. Even though her disappearance makes it clear that time travel is possible, his mind cannot wrap around the universe working that way.
Like time, Jonah has always believed aging is a one-way process. But again, his beliefs are upended when he learns that he and the other kids were put through an age-reversal process that turned them back into babies. Jonah thought he had a general understanding of time travel from watching science fiction movies, but there are so many rules for traversing time. Jonah cannot hope to understand them all.
In Chapter 33, Jonah, Chip, and Katherine travel back in time. After all his inability to understand or conceive of concepts that do not match up with what he has always known, Jonah is forced to put those struggles aside. It is difficult to understand exactly how time travel works, even while he is experiencing it, but Jonah learns to change his views on the fly. After having so many beliefs destroyed throughout the book, Jonah cannot cling to who he wants to be or how he wants the world to work. His old views on the universe are proven inaccurate, so he modifies his thinking to adapt.
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