53 pages • 1 hour read
Chris ColferThe Wishing Spell
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Red Riding Hood Kingdom”
The next day, Alex and Conner arrive outside the wall surrounding the Red Riding Hood Kingdom. After walking for hours, they still haven’t found a gate, and Conner decides to climb a tree and hop over the wall. Alex begs him not to, but Conner jumps, misses the wall, and falls over the other side. Alex scrambles up the tree and finds Conner lying atop a big pile of hay. She joins him, and they enter the kingdom. They pass through the Bo Peep family farms before reaching the only town, where they find Red Riding Hood’s castle and Jack’s beanstalk.
At the base of the beanstalk, they meet Jack, who says little before storming into his workshop and slamming the door. The golden harp opens a window in Jack’s house, and the twins strike up a conversation with her. The harp tells them to go with Jack to the castle later. Every week Jack delivers a basket to the castle and Red Riding Hood proposes to him, but he turns her down. Jack’s heart belongs to someone else, but the harp doesn’t know who.
Jack, Alex, and Conner go to the castle, which seems like a condensed version of Cinderella’s palace. Red Riding Hood is about Jack’s age and overdressed for a basket delivery. While Jack meets with Red Riding Hood, the twins go to see the basket collection, which includes thousands of baskets. After an hour of searching, they find nothing and return to the throne room in time to see a dove alight on the windowsill. Seeing the dove, Jack jumps up and rushes out. Alex and Conner follow. The journal says the castle isn’t guarded after midnight, so the twins get a room at the Shoe Inn to wait.
Later that night, they sneak into the basket room. As they search, they hear a sound and look up to see a grappling hook attached to the window. Alex and Conner hide as the Evil Queen’s huntress enters, finds the basket, and plucks a piece of bark from it. Conner gets a splinter and yelps, drawing the huntress’s attention. The huntress kicks over a lit lantern, setting the baskets on fire, and leaves. While the baskets burn, Alex manages to get bark from the basket they need, and she and Conner escape out a window.
As they make their way to the kingdom’s east gate, Alex and Conner wonder who the woman was and if she was looking for the Wishing Spell ingredients, too. At the gate, they see Jack meet with Goldilocks, and the twins realize Goldilocks is the woman Jack loves. Jack begs Goldilocks to let him come with her, but she refuses because it’s not worth Jack ruining his life. Goldilocks rides off into the night, leaving a distraught Jack to walk home. As Alex and Conner leave the kingdom, they realize that “not every fairy-tale character gets a happily-ever-after” (235).
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Troll and Goblin Territory”
Alex and Conner get lost after leaving the Red Riding Hood Kingdom and end up in the troll and goblin territory, instead of the Fairy Kingdom. They walk into a trap, and a goblin and troll cart them off as slaves. The troll and goblin kingdom is underground, and the cart passes humans being forced to dig tunnels before entering a throne room with more humans serving food. A goblin and troll sit on a dual throne, a crown suspended between them. A young troll girl gazes at Conner as the cart leaves the room. Alex and Conner are dumped in a cell, and their bags are tossed in a pile of trash.
The prisoner in the next cell is the traveling tradesman, a man who used to roam the kingdom and trade worthless items for things of value. The tradesman knows of the journal but doesn’t know if the author ever completed the Wishing Spell. He doesn’t know what the mystery items are supposed to be either, which leaves Alex and Conner feeling hopeless. The tradesman tells them not to worry about it. They’re slaves of the trolls and goblins now, and “whatever journey you were on, I’m afraid it’s over” (249).
The twins fall into an uneasy sleep, and Conner wakes to see the troll girl from the throne room staring at him. The girl’s name is Trollbella the troll princess, and she has a crush on Conner. She offers Conner and Alex freedom in exchange for a kiss from Conner. Alex pushes Conner to the bars, where Trollbella kisses him and then lets the twins go. Alex grabs the cell key from the princess, locks Trollbella in the cell, and then frees the other slaves. The slaves sneak through the throne room, where trolls and goblins sleep sprawled on the floor. When they’re almost out, Conner realizes the crown over the thrones is the crown from the Wishing Spell ingredients list.
Connor climbs the throne and gets the crown, but he falls in the goblin king’s lap, waking him and several other trolls and goblins. Alex and Conner run with the creatures in pursuit. At the end of a tunnel, the tradesman knocks over a statue to block the creatures and tells the twins to run. He’ll stay to distract the creatures because he’s wanted in all the kingdoms. He thinks Conner and Alex deserve a chance at freedom more than he does. Reluctantly, Alex and Conner take a tunnel labeled Fairy Kingdom, feeling like they let the tradesman down. Alex doesn’t understand how he could sacrifice himself for them, and Conner suggests that trading his freedom for theirs “would be the only honest trade he’d ever make” (260).
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
Chapter 10 contains a fairy-tale mashup—a story that draws from a few different fairy tales and combines them in a new way. Jack, Goldilocks, and Red Riding Hood are from three different stories, and Colfer has brought them together by introducing a love triangle, jealousy, and Jack being a citizen of Red Riding Hood’s kingdom. These characters are very different from their original fairy-tale personas. Red Riding Hood is shallow and ditzy, the complete opposite of the tough girl that she’s often portrayed as. Jack appears disheartened and disillusioned at first, which is different from the optimistic boy who traded a cow for magic beans, but his sorrow is soon attributed to being without Goldilocks. Rather than the little girl who wandered into a house and was frightened away, Goldilocks is a hardened criminal on the run. The dynamics between these characters become more important as the story progresses.
Several side characters appear in these chapters in order to deepen the realistic nature of the fairy-tale world. The golden harp from Jack and the Beanstalk is a chatty instrument who helps to provide background information about Jack. The traveling tradesman is a universal fairy-tale construct. He is well-known for giving Jack the magic beans for his cow, but the tradesman archetype appears in any fairy tale where a seemingly harmless trade is made that turns out to have dire consequences. The tradesman’s decision to stay behind while the twins escape shows that he regrets his decisions and wants to make an honest trade for once. Trollbella is a parody of the romantic fairy-tale plot. In many fairy tales, kisses break spells, and often the maiden is unconscious when the kiss takes place, meaning she has no choice but to participate. Here, Conner just doesn’t want to kiss Trollbella, but Alex forces him to so they can escape the goblins and trolls.
