49 pages • 1 hour read
Rick RiordanThe Maze of Bones
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2008A 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 11-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
Amy and Dan arrive in Paris after a long and uncomfortable flight during which Amy read multiple books about Franklin and Paris. Dan and Amy are pleasantly surprised when Nellie, whose mother was French, speaks French fluently. At the end of the airport hallway, they see a crowd gathered around someone: Jonah Wizard. Amy hates crowds and feels unkempt after the flight. Jonah plays comfortably to the crowd but notices Amy and Dan in the distance. He brings them over and singles them out, causing Amy to feel frozen and embarrassed.
In the limo, Nellie mentions that she likes Jonah’s album, but he tells her to be quiet, claiming he only talks to Cahills. He describes how he owns Paris, with a successful art gallery, art business, and a new French pop-up children’s book coming out. He claims to be more important than Ben Franklin himself and thinks winning this prize will enhance his fame. Amy snaps and defends Franklin’s historical importance. Jonah offers to work with the siblings and give them a cut of the winnings. Amy and Dan are skeptical since Alistair double-crossed them. Jonah disparages Alistair, claiming he lost his fortune on bad investments and just wants to rehabilitate his image. He says that if they worked together, they could even stand up to the Kabras. Amy is tempted by the offer but thinks everything Jonah says could be an act.
Amy spots something outside the window and asks to be let out in front of a seedy hotel called Maison des Gardons. Jonah thinks this must be their lodging and deposits them in front. They ask Nellie to check them in and take off after the lead Amy spotted: Irina Spasky, with the almanac.
Chapter 12 Summary
The siblings follow Irina, who wears a bright red scarf that makes it seem like she wants to be discovered. She leads them into the subway, on multiple trains, and out into a neighborhood called Passy, which Amy remembers as the area Ben Franklin inhabited during his time in Paris. Dan longs to pause and eat, but they can’t let Irina get away.
They trail Irina to the Institute for International Diplomacy, a private club that sports a Lucian crest. Dan watches her punch the code in the door; the siblings are then able to get in using the same code. The club is opulent, with marble floors and chandeliers. Amy realizes that Paris must be some kind of Lucian stronghold. Dan notices a room labelled “Arsenal” and sneaks in. He can’t resist pocketing a few items, including a battery invented by Franklin and a strange metal orb with a blinking red light. They spot Irina and follow her into a tech room, where she analyzes a map of the city and zooms in on an island in the Seine called Île Saint-Louis. After she leaves, they look through her files and notice a picture of the man in the dark suit.
A guard discovers the siblings snooping in the map room, and they narrowly escape through the window.
Chapter 13 Summary
Inside an ice cream van, the Holt children—Hamilton, Madison, and Reagan—fight viciously over fudgsicles until their father breaks them up. He demands a report from the children, who reveal that Dan and Amy are headed to Île Saint-Louis. Hamilton chides Madison for getting the address wrong last time, which caused the family to drive their rental car into the Seine. Their bickering reveals that both the house fire at Grace’s mansion and the bomb at the Franklin Institute were their doing, though they failed to accomplish their goal of neutralizing Dan and Amy.
Reagan expresses some guilt about setting off an explosion that could have killed people. The other Holts accuse her of going soft. The family decides to follow Dan and Amy and steal the almanac from them. The children start fighting over ice cream again, but this time their father, Eisenhower, lets them wrestle it out. Eisenhower thinks about how people laughed at him for flunking out of West Point and failing the FBI entrance exam. He wants to win this contest so that nobody will ever laugh at him again. He pounds his fist into the van’s cash register and thinks about an old score he has to settle with Dan and Amy’s parents.
Chapter 14 Summary
Amy and Dan stop at a boulangerie (bakery), finally giving into their growling stomachs. Amy notices how many buildings have lightning rods—one of Franklin’s inventions. Amy explains to Dan that Paris was the first city to implement the lightning rods and that many buildings still sport the original design.
Amy worries that the Île Saint-Louis clue is a trap but figures they should try it. They walk through the city and cross a bridge to the island. Amy feels increasingly nervous and paranoid. At the address, they find a cemetery. Amy can’t think of anything connecting this to Franklin. She approaches a mausoleum and sees an inscription with her and Dan’s name on it. It’s a trap: The ground collapses, causing Dan and Amy to fall into a pit.
The Holts pop out and laugh at them, reminding Amy of her bad dream. The Holts demand to know the meaning of the clue, but Amy doesn’t know. A cement truck arrives that the Holts didn’t seem to order: Somebody has come to fill in the pit. Dan convinces the Holts to let them out, saying that Amy knows the meaning of the clues. The Holts help them out of the pit. Mysterious henchmen emerge from the truck, but the Holts fight them. Dan throws the strange orb, which explodes, revealing itself to be a concussive grenade. The Holts are knocked out, but two of their assailants are still capable of fighting. Amy uses the battery to shock the henchmen and secure her and Dan’s escape over the bridge. Amy spots the man in the dark suit watching them from the shadows.
Chapter 15 Summary
Nellie is upset at the siblings for disappearing for hours and demands to know the whole truth. Amy and Dan tell her everything that just happened and apologize for not having enough money to pay for Nellie’s flight home. Dan thinks Nellie is going to be angry, but she hugs them close. She’ll cover the rest of their expenses with credit and agrees to help them fight off their nasty relatives.
The next morning, Amy apologizes to Dan for getting them into a dangerous situation, but Dan reassures her. They wonder why the man in the dark suit was at the cemetery, since they now know the Holts set the fire and laid the bomb.
Amy believes the next clue will lie in the Catacombs, the tunnels under Paris full of human remains. On the way to the Catacombs, they run into Alistair Oh, who still claims to want an alliance. The siblings do not trust him, and Nellie hits him over the head. He warns the siblings that they are in terrible danger because all the other branches of the family believe Grace favored them and gave them inside information. Alistair proposes a trade: He could tell them more about their parents in exchange for inside information about the clues. He implies that he knows something about their mother’s love of clues, their father’s true profession, and the mystery of the night they died. Before the siblings can learn more, Alistair spots Ian and Natalie heading toward the entrance to the Catacombs. Alistair offers to hold them off while the siblings investigate the Catacombs.
Chapters 11-15 Analysis
Rather than falling apart in the face of struggle like the other teams do, Amy and Dan grow closer with each other and with Nellie. Dan and Amy’s relationship with Nellie hits a key turning point when Jonah reveals his elitism and rudely refuses to talk to her because she isn’t a Cahill. Dan and Amy feel defensive of Nellie, who behaves more like family than Jonah. This moment develops the theme of Competing Definitions of Family by juxtaposing Jonah’s definition against Amy and Dan’s. Jonah, fame- and power-obsessed, sees Cahill family membership as a kind of in-group status—to him, that’s family. Amy and Dan reject this worldview. They can barely believe that they or anyone they respect, like Ben Franklin, could be related to people like Jonah and the Kabras. Amy and Dan ultimately place no importance on their blood connection to such people. Instead, they value the warmth, support, and respect that Nellie offers and that she further demonstrates when she hugs them instead of being mad at them for lying about the clue hunt. Nellie steps up to defend her charges against their bad relatives and defies Aunt Beatrice’s demands. She puts herself in danger for the siblings and treats them with the warmth that they long for as children without parents. This unconditional love makes a true family, the novel suggests.
Jonah contributes to another major theme, The Damaging Power of Greed, by demonstrating a kind of greed predicated on fame and influence. Despite the fame he already has through his record deals, TV shows, art galleries, and children’s books, Jonah wants to solidify his primacy by winning the family clue quest. Underneath his arrogance, there’s an implication that fame is fickle and precarious; Jonah cannot simply content himself with what he has but must continue working hard to remain powerful. No amount of fame and influence will ever be enough to guarantee his primacy, which hints that one day his obsession will likely destroy him.
Chapter 13 approaches the theme of greed’s destructive power by floating into the Holts’ perspective—primarily that of the father, Eisenhower. The Holts represent greed predicated on a hunger for respect. Prior to this chapter, Eisenhower and the Holts primarily functioned like comic relief, with many references to their brawn, lack of brains, and ensuing slapstick mistakes. Here, however, the narrator reveals the emotional wound that drives Eisenhower’s obsession with winning the clue quest and showing up his family members. The family members each bear the name of a former US president; Eisenhower’s abortive careers as a military officer and FBI employee further associate the Holts with America and its ruling class but also imply that they have not attained the kind of power and success they expected. The resulting insecurity causes Eisenhower to demand total obedience from his children, even if they have moral objections. This tension comes to a head when Reagan expresses her misgivings about blowing up their own family members. Eisenhower is too consumed by his own hunger for respect to grant any respect to his own child. He allows the children to fight and wrestle, causing the cracks in the family to deepen.
The Holts’ chapter also plays to the conventions of the mystery genre by setting up a key reversal. The Holts’ chapter reveals that they were the ones who set Grace’s house on fire and planted the bomb that injured the Starlings. Consequently, the man in the dark suit was merely a red herring (a false lead); at the very least, he wasn’t solely responsible for the fire or the bomb. This revelation only heightens the ambiguity surrounding his loyalty and role, creating suspense.
Another mystery novel trope this section employs is the trap. Amy and Dan follow clues laid by Irina only to realize that they’ve fallen into a literal and metaphorical trap: a pit in a graveyard with a threatening cement truck barreling toward them. Amy also falls into a kind of emotional trap, remembering her nightmare and freezing up in panic. Amy’s inability to speak up for and lead the siblings puts them in serious danger. Not only do the other teams trap Amy and Dan physically, but they trap Amy mentally by putting her down and making it hard for her to believe in herself. To progress in both the competition and in life, Amy will need to confront her self-doubt.
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By Rick Riordan
