51 pages • 1 hour read
Nina SimonMother Daughter Murder Night
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This novel includes racism against Latinx people as well as against Filipino and Jewish people. Sexist language and attitudes are depicted by some characters. Finally, there is the threat of gun violence as well as actual arson and murder. The possibility of abortion is briefly discussed.
At the slough, Beth has to clean up the dead carcass of a harbor seal before she can leave for work, and Jack, her daughter, paddles up, asking her mother if she needs help. Beth uses a damask tablecloth her mother gave her as a Chanukah gift to bury the seal in. The mother and daughter plan to have a foot-long and watch a sci-fi slasher movie later. This movie and sandwich tradition is one Beth worries will fall by the wayside soon because Jack is now 15 years old and has a job.
Chapter 1 Summary
Lana Rubicon, Beth’s mother, is laying on her kitchen floor, unable to get up. She calls her assistant to have her reschedule her meetings, and then she calls 911. She has an MRI and a PET scan at the hospital, and she must stay overnight for observation. The next morning, the doctor comes in and tells her that she has brain tumors that must be removed. The hope is that she has brain cancer rather than cancer in another part of the body that has spread to her brain.
Chapter 2 Summary
Lana calls Beth and tells her that she has brain tumors. Lana wants to find a new medical establishment that she believes is more up to her standards, and she agrees to go to Stanford. As Beth drives the long distance to her mother, Lana texts her that the cancer is at least Stage 4 cancer and asks Beth to bring her more flattering clothes. The mother and daughter had been separated for five years until Lana had a breast cancer scare that slowly brought the two back into a tentative relationship. Beth knows that the situation is serious because Lana agrees to go to Elkhorn with Beth.
Beth arrives at the hospital and learns that Lana plans to return home in six weeks. Beth brings her mother back to her house and helps her into Jack’s bed. It is frightening for Beth to see her mother doing what Beth says because Lana is usually so stubborn. After her mother falls asleep, Beth, a nurse, calls in some favors and manages to get her mother an appointment with Stanford’s top brain surgeon the next day.
Chapter 3 Summary
Seventeen weeks have passed. Lana has learned that her condition will be chronic because even though the brain surgery was a success, the doctors could not remove all of the tumors. Lana is undergoing chemotherapy, which is wreaking havoc on her body, and her work is suffering because she is away. Lana is bored much of the time with Beth gone and Jack out paddling when she is not at school. She is used to people caring about her opinion, but now she feels irrelevant. She stares out her window one night at 2:00 am using binoculars, and she sees someone holding a flashlight and pushing a wheelbarrow. He unloads his cargo into the water, and Lana is jealous of the man for his ability to be out in the world.
Chapter 4 Summary
Jack, whose full name is Jacqueline Avital Santos Rubicon, is part Jewish, part Filipino, and she works giving kayak tours. She hopes to use her money to purchase a used sailboat.
One day, she rides her bike to work and sees an unfamiliar green bike near the fence where she chains up her own bike. Her boss, Paul Hanley, asks her to close up the shop that evening, and she reluctantly agrees. There are a couple of people and a bachelor party on her sunset tour, and things start to go sour when nobody listens to her. She decides to end the tour early, and she tries to get the drunk bachelors back to shore. They get out of the kayaks before they get to shore, and Jack puts the kayaks away as the men come out of the water. When Jack arrives home, she sees her mother and grandmother arguing over furniture that Lana has purchased.
Chapter 5 Summary
When Jack gets to work the next day, she sees that the green bike is gone. Out on the slough, a man notices a person floating in the water wearing a life jacket. Jack is unsure if she recognizes him, and as she prepares to give him CPR, she realizes that the man is dead.
Chapter 6 Summary
Jack calls the Coast Guard and successfully ensures that everyone in her group is present. She gets back to the Shack and tells fellow employee, Travis, to contact Paul and tell him what happened. The authorities come, and Jack assures them that the man was not on her tour. She gets onto a Coast Guard boat to show them where she found the body. There are two detectives on the boat, Detective Nicoletti and Detective Ramirez. She tells them that two people on her tour found the body. She explains what happened and tells them that she does not recognize the man.
Chapter 7 Summary
When Beth gets home, she sees her mother and daughter lying in bed while Lana reads a book, stroking Jack’s hair. Beth feels a bit jealous of what she sees. Lana tells Beth about the dead body, and Jack explains how for a moment, she felt like the body could have been her, but her mother explains that she is a good swimmer and that would not happen to her. Lana plans to call Jack in sick to school the next day, but Jack says she would feel better going to school. Lana knows the upcoming week will be hard because of her chemo, and she feels like Beth and Jack do not notice or need her because they have each other.
Chapter 8 Summary
After school on Monday, Detectives Nicoletti and Ramirez come to Jack’s house, and she recognizes that Detective Nicoletti is the one in charge. The detectives tell her they have identified the man, and she tells them that he was not on her tour. They show her a photo, but she still does not recognize the man, Ricardo Cruz. Ricardo worked for a land trust as a naturalist. They tell her that he was on her tour Saturday night, and they show her the reservation book to prove it. When she looks at the book, Jack tells them that the man paid but since there is no checkmark, he never showed up. The detectives tell her that they know her Saturday night tour was rowdy, and Nicoletti then tells her that he was told she had been flirting and drinking. Jack knows that the situation is bad because they will never believe a brown girl over a middle-aged white man. Detective Nicoletti becomes aggressive, telling her that he knows “about girls like [her]” (440) and asking if she likes older men. Lana stops the detectives from attacking Jack, and the detectives tell her that the death was not an accident.
Chapter 9 Summary
Detective Ramirez is kinder when she speaks to Jack, but Nicoletti jumps in and asks Jack if she is “more than friends” (45) with any of her coworkers. Ramirez then points out the mistakes she made on the tour, including letting the guests drink. Jack cannot deny it. Lana breaks in and tells the detectives that on Saturday morning she saw a man with the wheelbarrow on the farther side of the slough. Nicoletti tells her that the man died a mile or two away, but Lana corrects him, saying that that is where his body was found, but he may not have died there. When the detectives leave, Jack tells her grandma that she may have seen Ricardo before a few months ago when she was paddling.
Jack tells her mom about the detectives, and she realizes that her Saturday night tour did not make it to where the body was found. Beth is worried about the investigation because she knows Jack will not be treated fairly because she has brown skin and an absent father. Lana does not believe that race will play a role, but Beth has witnessed plenty of racism against her daughter. Jack wonders if it is safe to go on the slough.
Prologue-Chapter 9 Analysis
The Prologue establishes the relationships between the key main characters before the dramatic tension of the book develops. The first of these relationships is between Beth and her daughter, Jack. It is apparent that the two have a strong relationship because Beth is worried it will start to deteriorate as Jack ages and gets outside interests. At this point, Jack is shown to be helpful and wants to spend time with her mother. The relationship between Beth and her own mother, Lana, is depicted as being more complicated when Beth uses a tablecloth her mother gave her to bury a seal. This tablecloth is symbolic of the different values the two women have, as Beth believes that the gifts her mother sends her “belied her total lack of understanding of, or interest in, [our] lives” (1). Beth is much more practical and down to Earth while her mother has finer tastes. These relationships will form the basis for the rest of the novel’s action, as the three generations are forced to face adversity together and test The Limit of Family Bonds.
Lana’s first scenes establish her priorities, which become evident as she learns about and initially deals with her brain tumors. The first aspect of her character on display is her commitment to her work. After she has fallen and cannot get up, she calls her assistant to reschedule her appointments before she calls 911. She also does not let her assistant know what has happened as she does not like displaying weakness. The second aspect of her character is her determination to have the best and her commitment to presenting herself well. This is demonstrated through the text messages she sends Beth as Beth drives to the hospital. One of these is quite serious, telling her daughter that she has at least Stage 4 cancer, and the second asks her daughter to bring her nice clothes. While these two texts seem to have greatly different importance attached to them, they are both very important to Lana.
These beginning chapters demonstrate the drastic change in circumstances and esteem that Lana has to suffer as she deals with her cancer. She is a real estate agent, and in Chapter 3, the narrator reveals that people usually listen to whatever Lana says. She is fashionable, powerful, and successful. She likes being in control. The cancer took all of this from her, as she is reliant on her daughter and her granddaughter, and she cannot even be in her own home. This causes her psychological discomfort, but it also damages the business she spent years developing. All of this leads Lana to feel irrelevant and will play a part in the decisions she eventually makes in later parts of the novel. The cancer proves especially harmful because it takes control—which Lana prizes more than almost anything else—away from her. This is the intrapersonal conflict she faces as she faces the interpersonal conflict with her daughter throughout the novel.
Jack is demonstrated to be mature and responsible for her age, and this becomes important when the detectives question her about the night before the body was found. Jack is only 15 years old, and she is the youngest employee at the Kayak Shack. Still, her boss trusts her to close up the shop when he wants to go out Saturday evening. She has grown up in the slough and knows the water routes and their conditions well. The men on her sunset tour are drunk and do not listen to her, but still, she acts as responsibly as she can and gets everyone back to shore safely. Despite the responsibility she demonstrates, she is still the one who ran the tour the night before the dead body was found, and this leaves her as a suspect in the dead man’s murder. She is also part Filipino and part Jewish, and racism in her community has caused her to face discrimination. She faces discrimination in the murder case as well, leading some to implicate her in the man’s death. While Jack’s competence is questioned at times throughout the novel, from the beginning, she proves to be the most insightful and knowledgeable of all of the main characters.
The main relational tension in the novel is between Lana and Beth, but Jack gets caught in the middle of this, which highlights The Struggles of Powerful Women. In the scene in Lana’s bed after Jack finds the body, both Lana and Beth get jealous of each other. Beth gets jealous seeing her mother and daughter in a comforting exchange, and then Lana gets jealous as she feels unneeded when Beth comes home. This demonstrates how both women desire strong intergenerational relationships but do not know how to achieve a solid relationship with each other. At this point in the novel, the author has not revealed what caused a breach in their relationship; all that is demonstrated is the outcome of the breach.
