47 pages • 1 hour read
Jaleigh JohnsonThe Mark of the Dragonfly
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2014A 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 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
A 13-year-old orphan named Piper Linny lives in Scrap Town Number Sixteen in the Merrow Kingdom in a world called Solace. Merrow and its rival kingdom, the Dragonfly territories, exist in a world that resembles late 19th-century industrial America. Piper survives by scavenging valuable items that fall through an atmospheric rift during the frequent meteor storms that afflict the region. She is also a talented mechanic who can repair virtually anything. One night, her young friend Micah brings her a damaged music box, which she is able to fix in a matter of minutes. Some of the residents of Scrap Town think that Piper’s abilities with machinery are supernatural.
Piper advises Micah on how to sell the music box at the trader’s market, where wealthy people come to purchase items like these. She also warns Micah about going out to scavenge during the dangerous meteor storms. The air is toxic, and it is illegal for residents to be caught outside of the underground shelters during a storm. Micah leaves the shack, assuring Piper that he will be careful. The glow in the pre-dawn sky warns Piper that she has very little time to pack up a few supplies and head to the shelter before the next storm hits. When she arrives, all the residents are already packed into the bunker. Piper doesn’t see Micah anywhere and learns he may have slipped out before the doors were locked.
Chapter 2 Summary
After checking with Micah’s older brother, Jory, Piper’s worsts fears are confirmed. Micah wanted to get ahead of the other scavengers by grabbing the first objects that fell from the sky. Risking imprisonment for disobeying the curfew, Piper darts out of the shelter and searches for Micah. She finds him just as the storm accelerates. The two find shelter under an overhanging rock ledge when they see two caravan wagons traveling right through the meteor field. The children watch in horror as a large meteor hurtles out of the sky and strikes the caravan.
The explosion on impact destroys one of the wagons, and Micah is struck on the head by flying debris. With Micah unconscious, Piper needs to find something to staunch the bleeding. She runs to the caravan wagons to see if there are any medical kits. In addition to finding dead bodies and large quantities of trade goods, Piper finds a girl of about 11 lying unconscious in one of the wagons.
Chapter 3 Summary
Thinking quickly, Piper cuts a piece of tarp and manages to drag Micah and the unconscious girl back to town. She finds Jory, and the two settle Micah in his family’s cabin. Jory then searches for a healer while Piper takes the girl back to her small shack. Because the girl is still unconscious, Piper tucks her into bed. As she does so, Piper recognizes a rare dragonfly tattoo on the girl’s forearm. This mark is only given to individuals under the protection of King Aron, ruler of the Dragonfly territories. Piper thinks bitterly that King Aron was indirectly responsible for her father’s death as he inhaled toxic fumes while working in the king’s iron factories to the south. Angrily dismissing the thought, Piper busies herself cooking a pot of fish broth for herself and the sleeping girl. She doesn’t notice that the girl has since awakened and stolen her knife.
Chapter 4 Summary
When Piper turns around, she realizes that the frightened girl might attack, so she tries calming her down by offering her food. The soup is so hot that the girl spits it all over Piper’s face, but she relaxes enough eventually to relinquish the knife. While the girl calms down and eats, Piper goes out to check on Micah. She learns from Jory that the boy will recover. Jory also warns Piper that another survivor from the caravan has come to town asking about a missing girl. While Piper is glad to shed the responsibility for the stranger, Jory says that the man didn’t appear trustworthy.
When Piper returns home, she finds her shack in shambles. The girl has emptied every drawer and cupboard and is sorting through Piper’s family photographs. Piper hastily snatches the pictures away and demands to know why the girl ransacked her home. Confused and disoriented, the girl starts babbling about how she fixed everything so that all the objects could be seen at once. She says the room was out of proportion without the clutter. Realizing that her guest might still be in shock, Piper soothes her and learns her name is Anna.
Chapter 5 Summary
As Piper asks questions, it becomes apparent that Anna doesn’t remember anything about her past, the dragonfly tattoo, or how she ended up in the caravan. She does remember getting injections of some kind. She also recognizes a picture of a building in Noveen, the capital of the Dragonfly territories.
This conversation is interrupted by a knock on the door. A well-dressed man with a broken arm claims to be Anna’s father and asks to see her. Anna seems terrified and calls him a wolf. She wants Piper to send him away, but he forces himself into the shack and tries to abduct Anna by force. Piper manages to knock him out with the heavy soup pot. Then, she hurriedly packs a bag of belongings and hustles Anna out of the shack. She intends to board the train that runs from Merrow all the way to Noveen under the assumption that the king will want Anna back.
Chapter 6 Summary
The 401 train is about to leave the station when the girls jump aboard as stowaways. Because the train must travel through bandit-infested territories, it contains many protective devices to prevent unauthorized boarding. When Piper tears a hole in a canvas covering between cars, an alarm bell immediately goes off. Anna points out that a pipe is about to send a burst of flame in Piper’s direction too. Piper somehow wills the flame jet to malfunction so that she is saved from scorching. After the two girls board the train, they are quickly spied by a ragged, barefoot young man who chases them directly into the path of security guards.
As the guards begin to shackle the girls, they notice the dragonfly tattoo and immediately stand down. Piper claims that she is Anna’s protector and the two are on secret government business. The young man, whose name is Gee, grudgingly allows them passage on the train as representatives of the king. He shows them to a lavish private apartment where the girls promptly fall asleep.
Gee then reports to the train’s engineer. She is an older woman named Jeyne Steel, who possesses a metal arm, and Gee is her head of security. Gee is actually a hybrid creature called a chamelin, who can shape-shift at will. Her fireman, named Trimble, also has unusual abilities: “Jeyne often said that between the fireman who was immune to fire and Gee the chamelin, her crew would fit just as comfortably in the capital circus as on the 401” (99).
Gee tells Jeyne about his suspicions regarding the two royal passengers, but she dismisses his concerns, saying they should be more worried about getting their cargo through Cutting Gap. After being dismissed, Gee sheds his clothes and climbs to the train’s roof, where he transforms into a dragon-like winged creature. As he flies above the train and scouts the terrain for hidden threats, he decides to take his boss’s advice and concentrate on bandits instead of stowaways.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The initial segment of the novel is concerned with world-building. Since Solace is presumed to be an alien planet that somehow attracts meteoric debris from another dimension, the novel firmly grounds itself in the science fiction genre. Further, the artifacts that plummet into the atmosphere of Solace are all associated with 19th-century America. Piper comes into contact with a broken pocket watch, a music box, and a battered copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: “The smell of aged paper tickled Piper’s nose. Embossed on the front cover was a picture of a girl and a small dog. Next to her stood a grinning scarecrow, a lion, and a man who looked like he was made entirely of metal” (5). Piper dismisses the book as unimportant because the illustration doesn’t make sense, and nobody can read the language in which the book is written.
The various scavenged objects and Piper’s description of the scrap town where she lives all situate the novel in the steampunk subgenre of science fiction. While many steampunk titles aren’t overtly political, The Mark of the Dragonfly hints at populism in American politics at the turn of the 20th century because of its veiled allusion to the allegorical meaning of L. Frank Baum’s book. Industrialism was changing the face of America during this time and displacing rural communities in much the same way that the iron factories of the Dragonfly territories are displacing agricultural villages and impoverishing large segments of the population because of King Aron’s ambitious exploration plans:
King Aron intended to change all that, with steamships that would weather any ocean storm, and airships that would pass over the highest mountains in safety and comfort. But to accomplish his goal, he needed iron—lots of iron (45).
Piper herself is a victim of this displacement since her father went to work in an iron factory and died while inhaling toxic fumes there. Now, Piper is an orphan who must scratch out a living as a scavenger and a mechanic. Her struggles foreground the theme of The Competition for Resources. In relation to that theme, the book also emphasizes the twin motifs of machines and money as they pertain to Piper’s struggle to survive. Much as she deplores King Argon’s iron mines, she is just as dependent on machinery as he is. Watches, music boxes, and trains are all made of metal. They are all mechanical objects that Piper knows how to fix better than anyone: “They claimed that there were many machines only Piper could fix, and that made some people angry, as if she were taking something away from them by being so good at her work” (13). As a result, Piper can get more money for her skills with machinery than from scavenging.
Piper’s obsession with money is apparent from the book’s earliest pages when she advises Micah on how to get the best deal from the traders for the music box she repaired. She is also quick to realize that Anna might be of value because the girl is marked with a dragonfly tattoo. Even though it will be many chapters before Piper realizes that Anna is part machine, she has already reduced the foundling to a financial commodity that she might be able to sell in Noveen. Piper assumes that the king will want Anna back and pay a bounty to have her restored.
The only other motivation that Piper exhibits in the initial segment is her desire to escape the scrap towns. Her aspiration for a better life speaks to the theme of Finding Home: “In another minute, they’d left Scrap Town Sixteen behind. Piper realized with a jolt that her dearest dream—to ride out of the scrap town—had come true in a heartbeat and she’d nearly missed it” (92). In taking Anna to Noveen, Piper assumes that she will be restoring the lost girl to her family. Since Piper has already lost her own family, she is equally eager to find a new home in a new city. In some sense, she believes that doing so will fulfill her father’s wish for her, thus representing one last link to family: “No matter what happened, Piper had sworn—to herself and to her dad—she’d never work in a factory down south, and she wouldn’t live out her life in a scrap town” (23).
