46 pages • 1 hour read
Jo Watson HacklSmack Dab in the Middle of Maybe
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Familial Love and Devotion
Cricket’s primary drive throughout the book is her love for and devotion to her mother. She is willing to go to great lengths, even risking her life, for the opportunity to see her mother again. Cricket believes a time will come when her mother stops abandoning her, and she thinks she can reach that future by finding the Bird Room and solving the puzzle. What Cricket does not realize is that her mother is not interested in solving Bob’s puzzle or finding the room again. She had been cheating on Cricket’s father and is now pregnant and living with a new boyfriend. Cricket wants to live in a world where her mother cares as deeply about her as she cares about her mother, but she must accept that such a world is out of reach.
People in Cricket’s life show others love and devotion. Cricket’s father loved her, and he wanted to teach her more about the woods. While Mama is not able or not willing to extend devotion and love to her daughter, she is devoted to setting up her mother’s headstone. Miss Vidalia felt a lot of love for Bob even though he was not her family. Like Cricket, she felt abandoned when Bob left her; he, like Mama, found it hard to be in one place for too long. After she comes to trust Cricket, Miss V. offers her the love that Cricket has been looking for. The two are technically family though they are only distantly related. Miss V. understands that to give Cricket the support she needs, she must open her home to Cricket and accept all the multitudes she contains.
Cricket finds it easier to extend compassion to others, including Mama and Aunt Belinda, once she understands that everybody is full of strange contradictions that might not always make sense. Aunt Belinda, for instance, does not treat Cricket well. Cricket understands that despite Belinda’s behavior, she does show love for her children, and she is steadfast enough to keep their lives stable when things get difficult. When she realizes the importance of self-reliance, Cricket also realizes that she can feel value and prioritize herself. Taking care of herself is one way to ensure that she gets the support she needs.
The Impact of Mental Illness
Although she is only 12 years old, Cricket has felt the impact of mental illness for much of her life. Her mother’s illness sometimes sends her into states of mania or depression, making her emotionally distant and hard to communicate with. It also causes mild delusions, particularly in her beliefs about the Bird Room. Sometimes, she throws away her medication and abruptly leaves her family. It is significant that the text never says explicitly which illness Mama has. Cricket has grown up in a community where mental illness is poorly understood and heavily stigmatized. People sometimes judge Mama because they do not understand her behavior.
Part of the process of destigmatizing mental illness is naming it and looking carefully at its causes and symptoms. Mama’s behavior might seem incomprehensible, but it is likely caused by a reasonably well-researched illness that can be effectively treated. Over the course of the story, Cricket gradually better understands mental illness, but she still does not really understand that there is a difference between who Mama is and how her symptoms shape her behavior. She does contain multitudes: Her disorder causes some of her behavior, but she also makes choices based on her wants and priorities.
Bob, like Mama, had an unspecified mental illness. Jo Watson Hackl has stated that Bob was based on Walter Inglis Anderson, who experienced psychosis and a nervous breakdown during a difficult time in his life. Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe provides no details about Bob’s mental state except that he spent time in a psychiatric hospital and that he wanted to recover in Electric City but ultimately felt that he needed to go elsewhere. Although Miss V. means well, she is not able to offer Cricket much clarity on how mental illness works because she has not yet destigmatized mental illness in her own life. She says that Bob was different, not that he had a mental illness, but she does not elaborate on what she thinks his differences mean. Cricket worries about her own mental state, but she does not share those worries with anyone. While it would be unhealthy for a child to feel afraid of having a mental illness, it would be helpful for Cricket to understand the genetic component of mental illness so that, if she needed it, she would know how to recognize the symptoms and seek support.
Observing the Beauty of the World
One of the most important things that Mama teaches Cricket is how to notice beauty in the world. There are many ways to appreciate the world, and each character has a unique approach. For Cricket’s father, the beauty of the world was found in the woods. He cared deeply about the woods, cataloging edible plants in his notebook and doing his best to teach Cricket about nature. For Mama, appreciating the beauty of the world meant slowing down and noticing details. Cricket remembers Mama taking slow, meandering walks in the woods so that she could fully appreciate their beauty. One of the first steps Cricket takes toward observing beauty is appreciating Charlene for the intelligent creature that she is. She maintains that appreciation until she releases the cricket back into the forest.
When Cricket meets Miss V., she learns about another way of noticing beauty. Miss V. loves poetry and often reads and recites it. She considers the words of the poems carefully and connects them to her own love of the world around her. Cricket has already heard one of the poems Miss V. loves, and that poem is an initial point of connection in their relationship. Cricket also captures the world’s beauty by creating artwork. She is talented, as evidenced by the place she receives at the spring break art camp. For Cricket, art is the way toward a better future. The time she has spent observing the beauty of the world around her has paid off. At the end of the story, Cricket realizes that she can rely on herself and trust herself to survive and thrive.
Bob and Mama have similar ways of seeing the beauty in the world. They both love art. Bob gave Mama the tanager cameo because he initially saw Cricket’s mother as a kindred spirit. In the end, it is not Mama but Cricket who sees the world as Bob does. She can appreciate the beauty of the Bird Room for what it is, instead of insisting that the paintings are alive, as Mama does. Cricket takes her observation of the world’s beauty one step further than her mother does. She is able to see the things that are imperfect and maybe even a little ordinary and see what is extraordinary about them.
