78 pages • 2 hours read
Richard PeckThe River Between Us
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2003A 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.
Themes
The Effects of War
War drives the plot points and shapes each of the characters in The River Between Us. In the frame story, the US is preparing to enter World War I, while the main story revolves around the Civil War. None of the transformations in the book would happen if not for imminent war. Though Howard doesn’t realize it, Grandma Tilly tells him the family’s story to prepare him for the realities of war. Within the story she tells, Delphine and Calinda would never have left New Orleans and stopped at Grand Tower if the Civil War had not been imminent. This action alters the course of their own lives and the lives of the Pruitt family members. War is the reason Noah leaves the house, provoking Mama’s crisis and prompting Tilly to leave Grand Tower for the first and last time.
Growing up during war shapes the characters’ identities. Tilly, Delphine, and Noah each assume the responsibilities of adulthood prematurely during the war. While they are in Cairo, Tilly and Delphine experience the harsh realities of war. Tilly writes, “We slept fast and deep through the brief nights, and hardly had the time to look up from our days, or to notice that we weren’t girls anymore” (91) Though Tilly and Delphine were only 16 and 15 years old, respectively, they fill the roles of women, nurses, and mothers for the sick soldiers, which forces the girls to grow and mature more quickly. Similarly, Noah’s experience on the battlefield and the loss of his arm causes him to experience more fear, pain, and helplessness than a 16-year-old would have to endure in life without war. Tilly sees that Noah has outgrown boyhood when he recovers from his fever, and Noah’s manner changes when they return home. Before, he was restless and eager to leave the house. After experiencing the war, Noah is content to fill his place as the man of the house and remain at home.
Though Howard has not seen the realities of war, he writes, “It was the summer of 1916, and war was raging across Europe, the Great War. Dad said it was just a question of time before America got in” (12). At the end of the book, Howard’s father tells him that he plans to enlist in the army as a doctor. Suddenly, the war that seemed so far away will affect Howard directly. He will have to take over as the man of the house, just as Noah did. Howard writes, “Nothing this grown-up had happened to me before. This was something Grandma Tilly couldn’t understand – how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him” (115). Though he did not live through the Civil War, without the war, Howard would not have been born, because Noah and Delphine would have never met each other. War shapes his life through the lives of his grandparents and his father. The effects of war outlast the war itself and affect generations to come.
Pride in Identity & Heritage
Finding pride in one’s identity and heritage is a recurring theme and an important facet of multiple characters’ development. First, for most of the novel, Howard does not know his true heritage and, therefore, does not understand his own identity. He discovers who he is only when he learns about his family history through Grandma Tilly’s story. Delphine provides an example of the pride that he will develop.
From the beginning, Delphine is outrageously proud of her New Orleans heritage. In her first breakfast with the Pruitt family, she talks incessantly of her Maman, calling her a “lady of fashion” and explaining her role in New Orleans’s social life (41). Later, Delphine tells Tilly about her Papa, Monsieur Jukes Duval, whose portrait she always hangs above her bed. Even when little is known of Delphine, her pride in her family is evident. Much later, she reveals that she and her mother are free women of color. When Mrs. Hanrahan insults Delphine and her father, Delphine proudly claims her heritage and later explains everything to Tilly. Though the war ends Delphine’s prior way of life, she adamantly sticks to her traditions, refusing to marry Noah because the women in her family “didn’t marry white men” (113). Even in her old age, Delphine sleeps beneath the portrait of her father. She is forced to navigate racist hierarchies that require her to camouflage her origins, but she never wavers in her pride in her identity as a free woman of color.
Noah, too, is proud of his identity as a soldier. Even while longing for home and family while he is sick in the hospital tent, he continues to study battle tactics, remaining eager to play his part in the war. Even though his uniform is too big, he is happy to be wearing it and even insists upon returning home in it, wearing it bloodstained and pinned around his missing arm.
Though Howard shows no signs of prior reflection upon his identity or heritage at the beginning of the book, he quickly develops pride in his biracial origins after hearing Grandma Tilly’s story. When Howard’s father reveals that Noah and Delphine are Howard’s true grandparents, he tells Howard, “I’m proud of every drop in me […] One day when you’ve had time to think it over, I hope you’ll be proud too” (116). Howard suddenly understands his father and himself, saying, “I didn’t have to think it over. I was proud of anything that made me his son. I was proud of being Noah’s grandson. And Delphine’s grandson” (116). Finding pride in his identity and his heritage is the main lesson that Howard derives from Grandma Tilly’s story.
The Perception of Time
The book takes place in two different eras, and each character perceives the passage of time differently. Howard, who is 15, has a very limited understanding of time than the older characters do. To him, the 55 years that passed between the Civil War and his own life feel like an eternity, and he has trouble processing that there are still people alive who voted for Abraham Lincoln. When he meets Grandma Tilly, Dr. Hutchings, Sr., Uncle Noah, and Aunt Delphine, he cannot even guess at how old they are or imagine them at his age. He is struck by the history that they and their old house must have experienced and says, “The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you’d have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were” (17). Even when Grandma Tilly begins telling Howard her story, he says he doesn’t even know how to listen to stories that are that old. The passing of time is a concept that Howard doesn’t know how to process.
Time is also a difficult topic for Cass to understand. When she is only 12 years old, her supernatural abilities show her things that happened long ago, such as French and Spanish explorers’ drowning in the Mississippi. At the start of the book, she also reveals that she has the ability to see the future. Cass doesn’t process time in a linear way. She struggles to distinguish between the past, the present, and the future, often mourning things that happened over 200 years ago or experiencing the future as if it were happening to her in the present moment. Calinda can also see the future; unlike Cass, she remains grounded in the present moment and able to distinguish between what is taking place and what is yet to come.
Despite the passing of time, history seems very present in Grand Tower. The ghost of Tilly’s mother is spotted in Howard’s father’s lifetime, and Howard wonders if Delphine will become “another Grand Tower haunt” (110). History becomes even more present to Howard through Grandma Tilly’s story. He learns how to conceive on time as he listens and connects the past to the present. By the end of the novel, he says, “I remember one more thing Grandma Tilly told me. She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course I had. She’d taken me back” (114). Through Grandma Tilly’s story, Howard experiences the past almost as vividly as Cass does through her visions. By the end of the book, he has a better understanding of time and how closely connected the years 1861 and 1916 are. Not only are the years connected through his genealogy, but in both of them, his family is preparing for the impact of war. He realizes that despite the passage of time, people remain very much the same across eras, and what he considers “history” happened relatively recently. This understanding matures him, and he says, “I was a lot older now too, a lot older than when this trip began, older and looking ahead” (116).
Related Titles
By Richard Peck
