41 pages • 1 hour read
Nora RobertsThe Awakening
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Chosen One
The Chosen One is a staple trope of fantasy and epic narratives. This theme surfaces in religious and spiritual traditions around the world—for example, in tales of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed from the Abrahamic religions, as well as classical and contemporary literature and film, such as Neo from The Matrix. The protagonist, the Chosen One, is special due to a set of unique talents, destiny, lineage, or other inheritance of distinction. Sometimes the Chosen One is set apart at birth; more often, they grow up in obscurity and their status is revealed in some surprising manner.
Typically, the Chosen One is the only being who possesses the power to avert an impending disaster or defeat a great evil menacing their world. Other examples include Anakin and Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and King Arthur, who reveals his identity by pulling a sword from the stone (in other versions, he is gifted a magical sword from the Lady of the Lake, as is Keegan in this novel). L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, The NeverEnding Story, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, George R. R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire, and Erin Hunter’s Warrior Cats series all engage with the Chosen One theme. Some fantasy stories play with or subvert the theme, such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where Frodo Baggins is an ordinary hobbit who takes on a monumental task; Tolkien’s point, which he also makes in The Hobbit, is that ordinary people can be capable of extraordinary courage.
Breen is unique because of her bloodline, a mix of Fey and Sidhe from Marg, a bit of god from Odran and her father, and humanity from her mother’s side. This blend makes Breen the key by which Odran might travel to and subject the human world as he wishes to subject Talamh. Breen is the reason Talamh is in special danger: Odran wants her power. However, she is uniquely gifted to fight him. As the Chosen One, this combined gift and burden plays a key role in Breen’s internal and external conflict. Keegan presses her to learn to fight when she’s never been a fighter, and she feels torn between the wish to follow her human dreams and obligation to protect Talamh and redeem her father’s sacrifice.
The Chosen One awakens to special powers and gifts, a concern reflected in the novel’s title. When Breen uses part of her inheritance to fly to Ireland in search of her father, then starts her blog “Finding Me,” she is thinking in the conventional terms of discovering her own interests and passions. Instead, she discovers a lineage she wasn’t aware of and a dangerous destiny. Breen awakens when she starts writing, taps into her imagination, and develops her talent and skills through daily practice. She also awakens to her latent power when Keegan presses her in training and Marg teaches her to draw on her will and intention when performing magick like creating fire.
Though Breen’s status has been conferred on her by her bloodline, over which she had no control, the novel also examines the role of choice in terms of Chosen One status. The ritual of the new Taoiseach finding the sword is described as both choosing and chosen, a kind of give and take where the finder has the choice to accept destiny or avert it. In Keegen’s experience: “The sword chose him […] and he chose to rise with it” (10). Marg chooses to give up the sword and send it back to the lake when she feels she has let Talamh down by allowing Odran in to cause destruction. Eian, Breen’s father, doesn’t make the same choice; instead, he tries to tend to his family in Philadelphia while fulfilling his duties in Talamh. Following his example, Breen chooses to accept her destiny and obligations as the Chosen One, the key between worlds. While this trope prevails throughout The Awakening, it plays an even greater role in the subsequent books in The Dragon Heart Legacy series, as Breen’s ability to fight and defeat Odran is tested.
The Importance of Love and Family
Despite the emphasis on gifts bequeathed by blood, The Awakening shows that family is not a bond of blood but one of love, loyalty, and protection. Breen remembers feeling “love absolute” when she dreams of her father, but she doesn’t have the same experience with her mother. Instead, Jennifer let fear rule her; her concern that Breen be kept safe meant she belittled and reined in her daughter’s ambitions and her interests, and left Breen feeling inadequate and less-than. Likewise, Marco’s family cannot accept that he is gay. In consequence, Breen and Marco gain emotional support from each other. They have also found nurturance and a surrogate parent in Sally, who identifies as a man but dresses and performs as a woman.
Breen’s family expands when she arrives in Talamh and meets Marg, who unconditionally loves and supports her. Keegan’s family also demonstrates that true family is made by loving bonds; he and his brother, Harken, and sister, Aisling, have mutually supportive relationships. Keegan and Harken both help care for Aisling’s children, and Keegan and his mother have a bond of trust and reliance. Initially, they accept and welcome Breen because she is Eian Kelly’s daughter, and because Eian was like a surrogate father to Keegan after Keegan’s father died. However, as Breen comes to know the O’Broins, they become like family to her, developing bonds of trust, loyalty, and care.
Jennifer is an example of how the bonds of blood can constrict, and Odran is a larger example of how biological bonds can cause pain and demand sacrifice. Both Breen’s mother and grandfather, in their own ways, want to steal what Breen is. Her mother wants her to hide and deny her gifts, and Odran wants to take them outright, as he first demonstrated by kidnapping Breen when she was three. Odran killed his own son, proving his ruthlessness. A bloodline may create a connection, but that connection can be dangerous, as Odran shows. In contrast, a true family heals, nurtures, and protects.
The novel also examines how romantic bonds create and sustain families. Examples of successful romantic pairings include Finola and Seamus, Morena’s grandparents; Marg and her partner, the silver-haired Sedric; Morena and Harken, who are sleeping together; and Sally and his partner, who also loves and supports Breen and Marco. Though Keegan and Breen are initially drawn together by sexual attraction, their increasing concern for one another suggests that they will grow to love and protect one another over the course of the next two books.
While much emphasis is put on blood in the granting and exercise of power, the novel suggests that family is built not by genetic material but by the wish to protect, support, and love.
Bridging Two Worlds
The conflict between different worlds creates tension throughout The Awakening. Light opposes dark, the old world opposes the new. The tension between the pastoral and urban are represented by the difference between Philadelphia and Talamh; one is a pre-industrial world and the other technologically advanced. As Marg explains to Breen: “Some, as the world you were reared in most of your life, wish for machines and technology to both build and destroy. But here, we have chosen to abjure such things and hold on to the magicks, their powers and their beauties” (177).
In Talamh, the pastoral way of life supports the inhabitants’ practice of magicks (though Breen can perform her spells like fire-lighting in the earth world as well). The earth world, for the most part, regards the paranormal with suspicion, hostility, or downright disbelief, as Marco demonstrates in the ending scene, and as Breen flippantly tells Marg when she dismisses the claim of an alternate reality.
Another world first opens up for Breen when she discovers the money her mother has hidden from her. This inheritance gives her a version of her known world where she is free of debt, can quit a job she’s not suited for, and can travel as she wishes. As Ireland provides the bridge between Philadelphia and Talamh, Breen moves from her apartment to the cottage, slowly transitioning from her modern world to one where fires are lit by intention and blood sacrifice can give an angry god untold powers.
Breen is the bridge between these worlds, just as Ireland is a transition and connecting point on her journey to discovering Talamh. Fey Cottage, Breen’s home away from home, holds her private world where she has time to walk, reflect, blog, and work on her stories. The Welcoming Tree, a natural feature modified with human-made elements, is the point of access between these worlds. Breen is also the key by which Odran hopes to enter her world. Breen’s worlds function like two halves of her life, each offering her something she craves. However, Breen finds, like many people who try to negotiate two worlds, that the demands of each conflict.
The role of agency plays out in the navigation between worlds. Breen is offered the choice of a third world in the dream vision where Odran invites her to rule with him. In contrast to the green beauty and magical mists of Talamh, Odran’s world is one of black towers, stone cliffs, and rocky seas, the scent of fire and war, and the shedding of blood. Breen struggles again with her choice in the final chapter when Keegan comes to Philadelphia. He realizes that in imposing her duty upon her, he is taking away her choice. However, Bree chooses to accept that she is the Chosen One and takes up that duty; Roberts portrays this as her claiming agency. Marco’s choice to hang on to Breen collapses the distinction between her two worlds and allows her to focus on Talamh in the next two books of the series, The Becoming and The Choice.
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