The Naturals

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-16

Part 2, Chapters 17-25

Part 3, Chapters 26-35

Parts 4, Chapters 36-37 and Part 5, Chapter 38

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Power of Family, for Better or Worse

The Naturals and Lacey Locke know better than anyone else in the novel how much influence a person’s family can have on the person they are, for better or worse. The Naturals’ special skills, which make them attractive to Special Agent Briggs in the first place, have been naturally honed by their traumatic pasts. Dean’s father is a prolific serial killer whom Briggs himself helped catch. Dean is so unable to break the biological connection he shares with his father that he pushes everyone else away to protect them from the monstrous potential he believes he possesses. He has apparently inherited from his father the ability to think like a killer, enough to predict their behavior.

Similarly, Michael’s abusive father is presumably the reason he can read facial expressions and body language so well. His resentment of his cold, wealthy family is clearly visible; he does not bother to hide this as he hides other parts of himself. Meanwhile, Cassie is haunted by memories of her mother, both before and after her murder. She acknowledges how much of Lorelai she has inherited: physical features, learned behaviors, ways of seeing the world. Cassie’s attachment to her mother’s memory is also part of the reason she cannot connect with her father’s family. They are loving and welcoming, but she does not feel she belongs with them. Locke turns out to be Cassie’s long-lost aunt who has become a serial killer after being haunted by her own abusive childhood.

Before arriving in DC to train with the Naturals, Cassie sees her family trauma as something that holds her back and makes her different from everyone else. She struggles with the belief that her mother’s death has “broken something inside [her]” and that she is “destined to spend the rest of [her] life two shades removed from the kind of love that the rest of [her father’s] family [feels] for [her]” (124). Meeting the other Naturals helps her understand that most people, especially teens who have lived through difficult childhoods, feel that their past hinders their potential for an emotionally healthy future. This opens the door for the creation of a new kind of family in each other. This “found” or externally built family becomes a significant way of recovering from the powerful, sometimes destructive, influence that biological family can have. Thus, the transformative meaning of family can ultimately be comforting and restorative for Cassie and the other Naturals.

The Psychology of Human Behavior

The novel grapples with the idea of studying the human mind to predict and classify human behavior. The author has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, adding credibility to the novel’s engagement of these subjects. Cassie correctly profiles the food orders of customers and the personalities of FBI agents. Still, some characters question the role of behavioral profiling in truly understanding a person. Michael objects to being profiled outright: “Maybe I don’t want to be profiled because I don’t want to know what you’d see. What little box I fit in. Who I really am” (145). He seems to begrudge Cassie’s, Dean’s, and Locke’s profiling abilities because he believes they both limit a person and reveal too much about them. This highlights an important question: Is reading someone’s behavior, personality, and environment as Cassie does restrictive or descriptive? Does it actively put them “in a box” or category they cannot escape, or does it merely explain—perhaps too accurately—who they already are?

Although the act of profiling someone based on their outward performance of self can be controversial and unwelcome to the subjects themselves, it has a special role in Cassie’s life. Shedding her own skin by mentally putting on someone else’s helps her cope with her confusing reality. She finds comfort in her talent for reading others, not only because it is one of the final bonds she shares with her mother, but also because it is her way of engaging with people. Growing up with a single mother who was constantly on the move—which Cassie later learns is because she was on the run from her own abusive past—and who conned people for a living has left Cassie socially stunted. She feels like an outsider, seemingly unable to make friends in a “traditional” way. The only way she can make sense of people is by observing and studying how they behave.

Even though she is not as socially divergent as Sloane, Cassie is still somewhat naïve in how she relates to others. For Cassie, people are predictable puzzles. She likes that she can put them into “boxes.” However, as she exercises her skills in the Naturals program and gets to know her new peers, she eventually learns that while people can be predictable, they are people, too: random, mysterious, and capricious. Thus, in some ways, her growing doubt in her own abilities, enhanced by the fact that Locke was killing right under her nose, helps Cassie grow socially. She can step outside of her own self-prescribed box to embrace human unpredictability.

Coming of Age

The Naturals is not a traditional bildungsroman in which the young protagonist successfully comes of age by overcoming emotional and physical obstacles; it is only the first book in a series that will presumably accomplish this more gradually. At the end of the novel, we are left wondering how Cassie will continue to fare in the Naturals program, whether she will choose Michael or Dean, and if she will ever discover the truth about her mother’s murder.

Protagonist Cassie nevertheless overcomes a significant amount of adversity in her search for answers. When we meet her, she feels stuck, going through the motions of her life ever since her mother disappeared. She was left at her grandmother’s house with her father’s family and has never quite gotten used to this new life, even after five years. She wants to fit in but cannot help feeling different. Her profiling skills are almost a curse, keeping her at a distance from her peers and giving her special insight into why she may be the outsider she feels like.

When she meets Briggs, she accepts that the Naturals program could be an opportunity to finally move forward:

Part of me wanted to laugh at him, to walk out of the room, to forget that any of this had ever happened, but the other part just kept thinking that for five years, I’d been living in limbo, like I was waiting for something without know what that something was (29).

Just knowing that she will gain some autonomy by doing something she wants gives her life purpose. Joining the program is the catalyst for Cassie’s coming into her own identity and learning to embrace not being “normal.” She meets other people who have similar pasts and who challenge her own view of the world.

This development mimics the concerns of YA readers who may identify with Cassie’s struggle to accept who she is and where she comes from. In the end, she learns to start seeing the emotional and physical challenges she has experienced as strengths. She can use her fear and firsthand knowledge to help catch dangerous people and save victims from the kind of trauma she knows too well.