Race to the Sun

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-15

Chapters 16-27

Chapters 28-34

Chapters 35-46

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Turquoise Pendant

Nizhoni’s turquoise pendant takes on a dual resonance in the novel as both a physical reminder of her mother and a symbol of her courage. In the first half of the text, Nizhoni clings to the pendant as a rare reminder of the mother who abandoned her as a toddler and about whom her father refuses to speak. She never takes off the necklace, even when she is playing sports at school (where jewelry is prohibited). In this way, Nizhoni imbues the necklace with significant emotional value, leading it to become a suitable sacrifice to Spider Woman when Mac fails to secure an equivalent offering from the sacred mountain—an act that emphasizes Nizhoni’s Courage as Separate From Fearlessness.

After Nizhoni has relinquished the necklace, however, she experiences her own personal growth and learns more about her mother, helping her to increasingly understand Bethany. Over the course of Nizhoni’s character arc, the necklace becomes a relic of their past relationship. Hanging on to the necklace signifies hanging onto the past in which a relationship with or greater understanding of her mother was impossible. Once Nizhoni experiences Bethany’s memories through the mirror, she no longer thinks about the necklace or its absence—filling that place instead with a new understanding that allows her to rescue Bethany from being a “lost one” and move forward in their relationship while still leaving space for anger and pain.

Gifts

Race to the Sun contains two types of gifts: supernatural powers that are bestowed upon Nizhoni and Mac as an ancestral inheritance and material gifts given as offerings that the children collect to deliver to Spider Woman in exchange for her help finding the House of the Sun. The first of these represent personal responsibility as well as talent and skill. Though Nizhoni and Mac are both impressed with the “coolness” of their powers, Nizhoni in particular recognizes that these gifts come at a cost. The price of being special and belonging to a community, she learns over the course of the novel, is the burden of responsibility.

This understanding of gifts as things that don’t come for free parallels what Nizhoni learns from Black Jet Girl about the gifts she must give to Spider Woman. When Black Jet Girl removes an earring (which is part of her body since all of her, including her clothing, is made of the black jet of Dibé Nitsaa), she comments that giving the gift hurts her but that this hurt is part of what makes the gift meaningful. Gifts, the novel suggests, are valuable because they demonstrate the giver’s willingness to sacrifice in the act of giving.

Roanhorse indicates that gifts forge bonds between characters; the giver sacrifices, and the recipient must responsibly honor that sacrifice. In the world of the novel, a gift becomes a social contract, one that brings communities with common goals closer together and continues their traditions over time.

Monsters

In Race to the Sun, Roanhorse positions monsters as both literal creatures and metaphors for injustice and racism in the real world. Their status as literal monsters adheres to the depiction of monsters in Navajo lore—a lore defined as a mythology insofar as it provides an origin tale of the Navajo people, but not in the sense of a mythology that is, by definition, not factual. For many of the Navajo community, the legends Roanhorse’s novel references represent a specific spiritual worldview, rather than fanciful or metaphoric stories.

In Roanhorse’s narrative, monsters take on an additional symbolic layer as representations of social, economic, and cultural oppression. Nizhoni’s early experiences with Mr. Charles indicate that Roanhorse’s monsters represent figures endowed with power in a society in which the dominant culture privileges wealth, whiteness, adulthood, and maleness. Nizhoni notes that Mr. Charles’s power, money, and age make him more admirable and credible to her father, who believes Mr. Charles over his own daughter when Nizhoni identifies and attacks him in the novel’s early chapters. Mr. Charles’s powerful lure also leads Nizhoni’s father (a Navajo himself) to overlook the concerns of other Indigenous groups, who are protesting Mr. Charles’s pipeline, for the sake of his own financial gain. In this way, the monsters also represent the danger of allowing the values and cultural norms of the dominant culture and its systems of oppression to distract from the importance of Cultural Inheritance and Preservation.