60 pages • 2 hours read
Margarita MontimoreOona Out of Order
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 7: “More Than This: 1999: 35/24” - Part 9: “All Tomorrow’s Parties: 1983: 19/26”
Part 7, Chapter 24 Summary
Oona wakes up in her brownstone with her mother and feels like she’s getting used to the leaps. There is a message written on her hand that says to ask Madeleine about her tattoo and to check her mother’s bag for a clue. While Madeleine is making them tea, Oona rummages in the bag and finds a card with the initials “M.D.C.R.” on it. Oona shows Madeleine the card and asks what it is and how it’s related to her tattoo. Madeleine tells her the initials stand for Mackenzie Dale Charles Ray. It takes Oona a moment to realize that “Mackenzie” is Kenzie and that he is also named for his father, Dale, and Oona’s father, Charles. He is Oona’s son.
Oona feels betrayed and confused. Madeline explains that Oona got pregnant with Dale on purpose, knowing he would die young and having seen how wonderful Kenzie is as an adult. She knew, however, that the time travel would prevent her from being a good mother, so one of Madeleine’s friends adopted Kenzie. The legal arrangements state that Oona can’t see or talk to Kenzie until he is 18.
Oona can’t understand her decision to give up a child she wanted, and Madeleine tells her that the Oona who did so had learned the first rule of being a mother quickly: to put her child’s happiness first. Oona is furious with Madeleine for lying and allowing her to give up Kenzie, and she asks her to leave. She reads a letter from her future self that says she knows Oona can’t fathom the decision and that Kenzie is in Boston. There is a plane ticket and an address in the top drawer of her desk.
Part 7, Chapter 25 Summary
Oona goes to the address in Boston and finds that it’s an apartment she rents. It contains another note: a plan for Oona to see Kenzie but also a warning that she will violate their legal arrangement if she appears as herself. Furthermore, doing so may hurt Kenzie and his current mothers. The letter cautions her that she has tried to change her fate before but now she needs to consider her son’s happiness first.
Oona is furious that she must pretend to be someone else to see her own son but follows the instructions. She adopts a gothic style and takes a fake name. She then goes to the coffeehouse and record store where Kenzie spends time doing homework. She sees Kenzie, now a young teenager, enter. He is obviously healthy and happy. They both order chai, a drink Kenzie introduced to Oona during an earlier leap. Kenzie barely pays any attention to her except to apologize for taking her chai, and Oona is devastated that she’s a stranger to him.
Part 7, Chapter 26 Summary
When a job opens at the coffeeshop, Oona takes it. Gradually, she and Kenzie bond over the music she plays during her shifts, including a Kate Bush album that Kenzie introduced her to in an earlier leap. He comments on her ring, which she saw him wearing at the Susanne Vega concert.
When Kenzie needs an adult to take him to a concert, Oona volunteers. However, his mothers want to know who she is and invite her to dinner. Oona agrees to go despite knowing it’s a terrible idea.
Part 7, Chapter 27 Summary
At dinner, Oona admires and is heartbroken by how close and obviously happy Kenzie and his mothers are. Kenzie talks to Oona about music—specifically, an album he found from the 1980s. The band, Candy Stranger, was a one-hit wonder, but Kenzie says the entire album is great and notes that the female lead singer and guitarist always wore a mask when performing.
Suddenly, one of Kenzie’s mothers recognizes Oona’s tattoo and asks her to leave. Kenzie is horrified at the revelation that Oona is his mother and angry that his adopted mothers lied to him about his origins. Oona pleads with Kenzie’s mothers, and it isn’t until Kenzie tearfully yells at Oona that she’s a stranger and means nothing to him that Oona leaves, fleeing both their home and Boston.
Madeleine is waiting at the brownstone to comfort her. She tells Oona she will have to be patient: She won’t see Kenzie again until after his mothers die. Oona realizes that he knew who she was when she met him at the Suzanne Vega concert; his erratic, upset behavior was not simply the result of grief over his mothers’ deaths. The postcards she received from him also finally make sense, and Oona understands that she is the one at whom he was angry.
Oona realizes that whenever she tries to change things, it worsens the situation. What’s more, she never listens to own her warnings to stop struggling against her fate. She wants to contact Kenzie again but doesn’t want to keep hurting people, especially her son. She makes the difficult decision to be absent from his life until he is ready to see her again. The one exception she makes is to send him her ring with a note about anger helping him soar. As she nears her next leap, she wishes to go to the future so she can be with Kenzie again.
Part 8, Chapter 28 Summary
Oona returns to consciousness in her home with a thirty-something Kenzie leaning over her. She is overjoyed to see him, especially when he calls her “Mom” for the first time. Oona’s joy is cut short by the sight of Madeleine in bed. She is obviously ill and can hardly hold up her champagne glass. She has enough energy to tell Oona that she thought motherhood would hamper her life but that Oona actually completed it.
Kenzie tells Oona that Madeleine has lymphoma and just weeks to live. He asks for help planning the funeral, as he’s been doing most of it himself. Oona feels like she’ll never be a good mother. When Oona asks for her usual letter, Kenzie said she tried but couldn’t write one and that she decided to make the most of the time she and Madeleine have left. He fills her in on the last year, saying that the presidential election and the loss of Bowie, Prince, and Cohen were difficult; however, Oona made sure it was an amazing year for him and Madeleine. The knowledge doesn’t help Oona feel better, and she wishes the coming year “wasn’t going to be […] terrible” (310).
Part 8, Chapter 29 Summary
Oona’s expectations of the year both are and aren’t true. Madeleine tries to cheer her up by saying Oona is lucky: She will eventually leap to an earlier time and see Madeleine alive again, while the years without her will have Kenzie. She tells Oona that her last year was wonderful, thanks to Oona. Oona tries to tell Madeleine what she means to her—how amazing her “sneaky” wisdom is and how thankful she is for Madeleine’s sacrifices on her behalf.
Oona apologizes to Kenzie for hurting his relationship with his mothers and for making his life difficult. He waves it off, and they talk about the oddness of meeting at the Suzanne Vega show. They discover that this is the first of Oona’s leaps where neither of them is pretending or hiding something.
Madeleine dies. Oona feels she can’t give the eulogy, so Kenzie says he will. When Oona feels guilty, he reminds her that he is more mature than her right now and that she can rest assured she is amazing in later leaps.
After the funeral, they talk about how Kenzie struggled losing both his parents at the same time. He said Madeleine helped him through, and Oona wonders when she’ll see her mother again. Kenzie says he envies Oona’s ability to leap. She guesses that he wants to see his mothers again, but he says that’s only part of it: He assumes Oona has a unique perspective, seeing and appreciating more. She is moved by how wise he is. He accidentally comments on an adventure she has in Europe in the 1980s, and Oona is intrigued. She thinks of all the sadness that she has experienced and that will come, but she decides to let her love for Kenzie keep her positive and to be present for him this year.
She offers to try to change fate—not to change her own life, but to improve his life with his mothers, even if it hurts her. Kenzie talks her out of it but is persuaded to take a trip to New Zealand to see a man he met online. On a day in December when Oona is to pick him up from the airport, she hears a familiar voice playing the guitar and singing for children in the library. It’s Peter Han. They have an awkward but wonderful coffee together during which he says he wanted to contact her but felt like he needed to wait, as everything has its time. They schedule a date in the following year so that 2018 Oona will have something to look forward to.
Part 9, Chapter 30 Summary
Oona becomes conscious of being kissed and hopes it’s not a dream. It isn’t: When she opens her eyes, she’s back at the party where she first leaped, kissing Dale in 1983. She is ecstatic to see him, her friends, and the 1980s fashion. Dale gives her one more birthday present: a necklace with an hourglass pendant. She feels sad, prompted by his leather jacket to think about his short life, but decides to finally take her future self’s advice and enjoy the moment. She kisses him as passionately as she can and feels it is “transcendent”—unlike any other man she has kissed, though she leaves an opening for Peter Han.
When the rest of the band wants to tune up for their show, Oona says she has been taking guitar lessons, that she’s really good, and that she hates the keyboard. She will quit school and tour with the band, but she’s going to play the guitar whether they take her or not. Dale is hurt and confused. Corey declares that since they are making changes, he doesn’t like the band’s name. Dale acquiesces when he sees how passionate Oona is, and they try more Velvet Underground-inspired names until they hit on Candy Stranger. Oona recognizes this as the band Kenzie identified as a one-hit wonder group that performs in Europe in the 1980s; the lead singer, a woman, always wears a mask.
When Dale asks if Madeleine will be okay with Oona dropping out of school, she is ecstatic to realize her mother is alive. Oona asks Dale to extend their time in Europe, and she is determined to cherish every moment with him to help her during times that are not as good. She understands that there are bad and good days and years to come, but she will appreciate the good when it appears. She knows that the coming year is going to be incredible.
Parts 7-9 Analysis
The last three parts concentrate on showing Consideration for Others. Part 7’s title, “More Than This,” comes from a 1982 song by Roxy Music and alludes to this theme as it overlaps with The Relationship Between Mothers and Children. Oona has been living for herself in the child’s role throughout the novel. In these chapters, she discovers she must start caring for someone else and become the mother.
Oona’s discovery that Kenzie is her son throws her into the deep end of mother love. Because she isn’t fully mature at this point, her love is selfish: She doesn’t consider his feelings or the consequences of her blind rush to be with him. Once again, her obsessive tendencies get in the way. She directs all her energy, time, thoughts, and emotions toward seeing him without considering the effect her efforts will have on his young life. Because this love isn’t healthy, it manifests in stalking and lying and negatively affects her relationship with Kenzie in a way that takes years to heal; it also fractures Kenzie’s relationship with his adoptive mothers.
The heartbreak Oona experiences at the end of Chapter 27 shows that she has finally processed the need to be less selfish. In a turning point, she sobs to Madeleine (herself an example of prioritizing one’s children), “It’s not like I ever pay attention. I end up doing what I want, anyway. But the way I hurt Kenzie tonight, I—I never want to hurt anyone like that again. Especially not my son” (298). Oona finally understands that to live well, she can’t always do what she wants: She must think about other people.
Proof that she has learned the final lesson comes when Oona offers to change things to benefit Kenzie at the expense of her own happiness. In the traditional bildungsroman, the sign that the character has reached maturity is that they start giving back, and here Oona tries to do so for her son.
Oona’s newfound wisdom immediately becomes necessary. Part 8’s name refers to Pink Floyd’s 1975 “Wish You Were Here,” a song about loss. In these chapters, Oona loses her mother, previously the giver of wisdom. In many narratives, such as the hero’s journey, the mentor leaves the story when the student has learned their lessons. Oona has completed her bildungsroman education. She now knows how to live her life well and how to be a mother to her son. Because of this, her own teacher can go. Oona herself is now the giver of “sneaky wisdom,” as demonstrated in the Prologue, where she tells the reader the answers to the lessons she has learned over the course of the novel.
The final part and chapter takes its title from the Velvet Underground’s 1967 “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” a song about a girl changing her identity much like Oona has changed over the novel. The title implies that Oona’s future is still unwritten—that there is potential for her to wear even more selves. While the tone of the song that accompanied the same party in Part 1 (“The Party’s Over”) is more somber, alluding to aging and changing, the title “All Tomorrow’s Parties” creates a triumphant tone. Likewise, the song itself begins with a heavy, marching rhythm under the singer Nico’s declarative vocals, setting the tone for Oona’s victorious return to the party she misses the most.
Because she has completed her personal journal to maturity, Oona arrives back in 1983 with the tools to live the next year successfully. Where she was originally bogged down with indecision, fear, and deference rooted in obsession, she returns determined to follow her passion; she can now master her feelings for her boyfriend and make clearheaded decisions. Yet she is not selfish. Her increased compassion enables her to support the bandmember whom she earlier reprimanded for using drugs, agreeing with his opinion about the band’s name. Most importantly, she has learned about Enjoying the Moment and Being Here Now. When she lets herself fully experience her kiss with Dale, it signals she is ready to embrace the life she is fated to lead.
