87 pages • 2 hours read
Matt de la PeñaThe Living
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Day 8, Chapter 51Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 51 Summary
Shy wakes the next morning on the sailboat to find that Shoeshine has been up all night finishing a homemade sail to replace the boat’s tattered original sail. Marcus has managed to fix the radio, and Shy listens to a report describing the state of America: “The earthquakes had caused the disease to spread so rapidly among the western states that people were no longer allowed to travel east […]. The coasts of California and Oregon and Washington were essentially giant quarantine areas for now” (303). Shy knows that he needs to get the duffel bag of vaccines to “the right people” as soon as he can (304). He thinks about Addison, unsure whether he cares what happens to her. He finally decides that she can’t have known what her father did and puts the thought of her out of his head for now. He sits with Carmen and holds her hand, wanting “everything to go back to the way it was” (304). Shoeshine raises the new sail and finally begins steering them away from the burned island, setting course for California. Shy feels grateful to be alive and with his companions, and he looks out over the ocean as he begins trying to process all that has happened to him over the last eight days.
Day 8 Analysis
For the first time since the sinking of the cruise ship, Shy feels something close to peace. After the climax of the book, De La Peña leaves the reader with a final scene of the four survivors escaping by sailboat, leaving the ruined island behind them for good. This scene essentially puts the story of the sunken cruise ship and the Hidden Islands to bed for good; Shy’s new mission is to protect the vaccine until he can get it into the right hands and find out whether his family is still alive. By closing out the story told in The Living and presenting the new stakes facing Shy and his crew, de la Peña ties the end of this book into the beginning of its sequel, giving the readers some closure while keeping the future open for the next book. We also see that Shy has finally begun to move past the events that have been haunting him for weeks and that he has “decided to stop thinking about things he couldn’t control” (305), instead choosing to simply be happy to be alive and with the people he cares about.
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