84 pages • 2 hours read
Alexandra BrackenThe Darkest Minds
Fiction | Novel | YA | 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. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The Prologue, from Ruby’s perspective, is set in Thurmond, a government rehabilitation camp. Ruby hears the “White Noise” going off while working in the camp’s garden, and she assumes it must be a punishment of some kind, although she does not know for what (1). Although the intense, painful sound is familiar to those at the camp, this time it sounds different to Ruby. She falls to the ground, crying, and loses consciousness.
Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1, still from Ruby’s point-of-view, starts with her memory of the first death in her fourth-grade class. Her classmate Grace Somerfield died suddenly in the lunchroom at school, sitting across from Ruby mid-conversation. This is Ruby’s first experience of Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration (IAAN), a disease that fatally affects children. At first, Ruby describes remembering the adults in her life keeping it secret, including her parents, who attempt to shelter her from hearing about its spread. The disease is first termed Everhart’s Disease, after the first boy (Michael Everhart) to die from it.
After Grace’s death, however, other children in Ruby’s school and neighborhood begin to die quickly. Ruby discovers a flier from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention sent to her parents with a list of symptoms to identify if a child is at risk, including psychological symptoms like becoming “sullen and withdrawn” or demonstrating “violent outbursts,” as well as physical symptoms like migraines, vomiting, and fainting (6-7). The list also included a mention of “behaviors or abilities that are inexplicable, dangerous, or cause you or others physical harm” (7). The flier warns parents to call if their child shows any of these signs. Ruby’s grandmother (Grams) calls to reassure her that she will be fine, and President Gray makes a speech reassuring the country that the government will handle the crisis. The chapter ends with Ruby voicing her suspicion that the flier shows the government is more afraid of the kids who live than the ones who die.
Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 is Ruby’s memory of the day she was first brought to Thurmond. She remembers the weather (continuous freezing rain) and being picked up from her parents’ house, brought to a warehouse with other kids, and kept from sleeping overnight. She and other young people, mostly ages 10-13, are given orders by adults who call themselves Psi Special Forces (PSFs). At the camp, one teenage boy resists being divided up for testing and is punished by being hit with a rifle butt in the mouth. He makes eye contact with Ruby afterward and smiles at her. As he is getting off the bus, he says something to the PSF who hit him; she immediately puts her gun inside her mouth and shoots herself. The boy is classified as an “Orange,” restrained, and taken away.
Ruby is taken to the Infirmary for sorting. On the way, she sees kids at the camps in cabins, and she notices those marked with green and blue Xs are allowed more freedom than those marked with orange, yellow, or red. As she is waiting her turn for sorting, she remembers her mother’s face as she locked her in the garage, and she hopes Grams will come to save her. Another girl, Samantha, tells her to try to appear brave and holds her hand.
The scientist doing the sorting tells Ruby not to be afraid, but she is very nervous. When he attempts to make her lie on the scanner, she receives flashes of his memories. She tells him, staring into his eyes, that she is Green. He repeats her words back to her, and he does sort her as Green. However, she again remembers her mother’s face, as well as the Orange boy smiling knowingly at her, and says: “I knew what I was” (23).
Chapter 3 Summary
Continuing the narrative from the chapter before, Ruby and Samantha (Sam) are assigned to Cabin 27 along with other Green girls. The two become friends, and Sam shares that her parents were the ones to send her to the camp. Ruby lies and says her parents are dead. Sam says if they ever leave the camp, they don’t need to be accountable to their parents again.
Five years pass, and the girls have adapted to a joyless life at the camp, spending the day working in silence at the Factory, with only time to talk briefly in the cabins at night. One day, working on the PSFs’ boots in the Factory, Ruby is bullied by a PSF who claims she isn’t lacing the boots properly. When he shouts at her, Sam intervenes, and Ruby doesn’t stand up for her, either, sensitive that she has a secret to hide.
Sam is punished for days and returns to the cabin angry with Ruby for being so passive. Ruby reaches out to her to try to explain. When she touches her, she receives a series of flashes of Sam’s memories, both from before and during her life at the camp. When they both recover, Sam does not remember knowing Ruby at all.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
Bracken starts off the novel with a short, suspenseful scene in the Prologue: Ruby, in Thurmond, reacting to the White Noise that injures her and will later set into motion the major events of the plot. The reader does not yet know what this camp is, nor why Ruby is there, but Bracken uses evocative sensory details (“We were working so close to the camp’s electric fence that I could smell the singed air and feel the voltage it shed vibrating in my teeth”) to generate interest in the character and her surroundings (1).
This scene leads into the next three chapters, which go back in time to fill in the background of both Bracken’s near-future dystopian setting and the character Ruby herself.
Chapter 1 describes the beginning of the pandemic (Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration, or IAAN) that first set off the economic and political chaos that serve as the backdrop for the rest of the story. Because the novel uses first-person point-of-view, the reader’s vantage point is Ruby’s, and the focus is on how the first appearances of IAAN seemed to a 9-year-old child attending elementary school. Bracken contrasts Ruby’s typical childhood concerns (“my own world of sunshine, ponies and my race car collection”) with the serious and frightening changes unfolding (3).
In these early chapters, there are some gaps in what is shared of Ruby’s memories, as well as some foreshadowing of what will later be important. At the end of Chapter 1, Ruby is still at home with her parents, wondering whether President Gray is afraid of the kids who survived IAAN. This mention of President Gray, as well as his anxieties about the survivor children, foreshadows both the government’s treatment of the Psi children, as well as Gray’s personal relationship with his own Psi son, Clancy, which will be examined in later chapters. At the beginning of Chapter 2, there is a jump in time: Ruby is being brought to Thurmond in a school bus, scared, alone, and in her pajamas, and the reader is not yet made aware of how this change in her life came to pass.
Chapters 2 and 3 work to establish what life at Thurmond is like for Ruby, as well as begin to provide the reader some major hints about the nature of Psi abilities. Bracken mentions the ability color categories—Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and Orange—and establishes, in Chapter 2, that some categories are considered more dangerous than others. Ruby is able to observe Orange abilities from the example of the rebellious young man on the bus in Chapter 2. This allows her to understand and label herself Orange, even as she hides her ability. Yet at this point in the narrative, Bracken lets the reader find out gradually about the other abilities, giving information here and there that allows the reader to infer what they might entail.
Also told in Chapters 2 and 3 is the story of Ruby’s friendship with Sam over the years, which provides Ruby with some important motivation throughout the rest of the novel and adds another layer of foreshadowing. The experience of having been close to Sam, and then having erased herself from her own best friend’s memories, is presented as a motivating trauma for Ruby. To accidentally erase someone’s memories of her is her character’s greatest fear. She worries about it while interacting with characters she cares about throughout the rest of the story, particularly Liam, Chubs, and Zu. It permanently impacts her ability to connect with others.
Revealing the story of Ruby’s accidental erasure of Sam’s memories at the beginning of the novel also proves to be foreshadowing in two respects. It provides an early hint about what happened to bring Ruby to the camp to begin with—she similarly erased her own parents’ memories of her—and it is foreshadowing for the end of the novel, when Ruby feels she has no choice but to erase herself from Liam’s mind in order to protect him.
