46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate DiCamilloThe Puppets of Spelhorst
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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Themes
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Important Quotes
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BetaThemes
The Transformative Power of Stories
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death.
One of the main themes in The Puppets of Spelhorst involves the magic of stories. In keeping with its broader emphasis on imagination, beauty, and wonder, the novel celebrates the act of storytelling, suggesting that it has the power to transform teller and listener alike.
Indeed, the novel frames stories as central to the characters’ quest for meaning. Each of the puppets begins the book with vague dreams and a desire to find purpose in their existence. However, it is storytelling that the puppets were made for, though they don’t realize it at first. When Spelhorst asks to buy the girl puppet on her own, he is told, “The puppets must be purchased together or not at all […] for they are in a story” (11). After a series of adventures, the puppets are reunited and used to tell the story of Spelhorst. To their surprise, the puppets find that there is joy and power in working together to tell stories and impact audiences. Moreover, storytelling represents the ultimate fulfillment of their individual dreams. The wolf, for example, finally feels as ferocious as she says, and her shadow instills fear into the audience. The boy finds greatness in his love story (real and staged) with the girl. The owl flies and uses his words of wisdom to make the audience think. The king becomes a wizard who blesses the audience, which he learns is much better than shouting commands as a king.
The play would not have happened if it weren’t for the young playwright: Emma. After the puppets arrive, she reads the letter that Spelhorst put in the trunk with the puppets and is moved by it. She decides to tell a story based on the letter, supported by adults like her uncle, who helps her set up the room as a makeshift theater, and Jane, who sings on stage, which helps her decide to leave her job as a maid and venture out into the world. In the coda, Emma is still writing stories as an adult, while Jane is still telling stories with the puppets around the world, which implies that finding their voices in that first production encouraged them to pursue their dreams.
The process of telling the story is important not just for the storytellers, but for those who hear it: “Something was happening in the blue room. The people were leaning forward. They were listening” (114). Annalise embodies this transformation, as hearing her story gives her closure, but the experience broadly awakens the audience to the joys and pains of life, leaving them forever changed.
The Importance of Community in Hard Times
Even as the novel celebrates individual dreams and motivations, it suggests that pursuing these to the exclusion of human connection can be harmful. Characters who want to be on their own at the beginning of the book find that they miss their friends when they are separated, and many of them learn that they can best fulfill their purpose as part of a group, not individually.
The author emphasizes that the puppets are best as a group from the beginning of the book. When the old man tries to buy the girl puppet on her own, the seller replies, “You cannot buy just one, […] they belong together” (11). The old man, who is used to approaching life alone, begrudgingly purchases the group and thus allows the girl puppet to keep her community. Similarly, Emma, who wrote a play for the puppets and has a special part in mind for each of them, insists that she and Martha find all of the puppets and reunite them when they discover that several have gone missing.
This separation is what convinces several of the puppets themselves that they need each other. One by one, the puppets are taken off the mantel until only the king is left. As he sits there, he thinks “if he could have anything at all, any of his heart’s desires, he would choose to have everyone returned to him” (96). The realization is particularly pointed coming from the king, who has been preoccupied with his power and rank throughout the novel; these things are necessarily relational and thus exposed as empty in the absence of community. Similarly, the wolf initially speaks of going off on her own, not recognizing that her dream of both “chasing and being chased” implies there are others with her (40). Even a predator exists in relationship to others, the novel suggests.
After the play, the puppets reiterate that the story needed all five of them to come to life. The boy says, “It’s just as the man in the toy store said, […] We were in a story together” (140-41). The puppets agree that they hope this is the first of many stories they will tell together—a hope that Jane’s actions fulfill, underscoring that the puppets are now bonded together by a shared purpose.
Love Without Regret
The play that Emma writes is a story of the old captain who loved, left, and lived to regret it. She uses three different characters to warn not only the boy but also the audience of the dangers of not appreciating what one has, if what one has is love. Spelhorst’s story, on which Emma’s play is based, communicates the same message, suggesting that love is among the most meaningful and awe-inspiring aspects of life.
Both Spelhorst and the boy could be content with their love but choose to leave her behind. They are determined to prove themselves to the girl/Annalise and her parents, even though both the girl and Annalise tell their respective lovers that they do not need to do so. In Emma’s version, a wise owl also appears and tells the boy, “Leave, […] and you will only regret” (123). Like Spelhorst, however, the boy is preoccupied with ideas of glory and fame, and so he sets off to sea anyway. The song that the girl puppet sings as he leaves her tells the story of a love who will not wait for the boy to return, further conveying that the boy has taken what they had for granted and implying that he will live to regret it.
Like Spelhorst, the boy finds this to be painfully true: “Sometimes, when he look[s] out to sea, the boy [thinks] he [sees] the owl who had spoken to him of destiny and regret” (129). Soon, years have passed and he has nothing to show for it. At this point in the play, there is nothing onstage except “the boy puppet covered in powder, looking like a ghost, staring out at the audience” (131). The visual—the puppet’s isolation, his ghostly appearance, and his searching gaze—implies that the boy spent decades of his life searching for something better but never found it, resulting in a kind of living death.
In both the play version of the story and in real life, the old sea captain dies of a broken heart. In the letter that Emma found in the trunk, Spelhorst apologizes to Annalise and tells her he regrets ever leaving her. Emma leaves the audience on a more hopeful note. Through the wizard, she ends the play with a blessing: “And wherever you go, may you love without regret—for that is the greatest glory there is” (135). The story thus urges the audience (and readers) not to make the same mistake Spelhorst/the boy did: Of all life’s wonders, love is the most important.
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By Kate DiCamillo
