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Catching Teller Crow
INTR
INTRODUCTION
ODUCTION
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF AMBELIN KWAYMULLINA
AND EZEKIEL KWAYMULLINA
Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, together with
their sibling Blaze, are the children of Australian Aboriginal
writer Sally Jane Morgan (born 1951) and her ex-husband Paul
Morgan. Ambelin and Ezekiel are of the Palyku people, an
Aboriginal people native to Western Australia; their
grandmother, Sally Jane Morgan’s mother Gladys, grew up in
the Parkerville Children’s Home due to the Australian
government’s policy, pursued until the 1970s, of forcibly
removing children from Aboriginal families and putting them in
group homes or with white adoptive families to “assimilate”
them to white Australian culture. Ambelin Kwaymullina, who
earned her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Western
Australia in 1998, is a scholar who studies law as it relates to
indigenous peoples as well as an author of Young Adult novels
and children’s books. Ezekiel Kwaymullina, who has dyslexia,
largely taught himself to read and dropped out of high school as
a young teenager; he subsequently became an author of
children’s books and Young Adult novels. Both Ambelin and
Ezekiel have co-authored children’s books with their mother
Sally Jane Morgan and with each other; Catching Teller Crow
(2018) was the first Young Adult novel Ambelin and Ezekiel co-
authored with each other.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In Catching Teller Crow (2018), Isobel Catching’s Australian
Aboriginal great-great-grandmother was forced to work for a
demeaning white employer after white colonization
encroached on her people’s land, while Catching’s great-
grandmother and grandmother both belonged to the “Stolen
Generations,” children forcibly removed from their Aboriginal
families and placed in group homes or with white adoptive
families to force assimilation into white Australian culture.
White British people began colonizing Australia in 1788.
Though they founded a penal colony in New South Wales,
colonization remained small-scale until about 1816. From 1816
through the 1800s, the white colonial population began
growing and expanding outward into the rest of Australia; their
livestock-based agricultural practices, among other phenomena
of colonization, infringed on Aboriginal land and disrupted
Aboriginal ways of life. In 1869, the white Australian
government passed the misleadingly named Aboriginal
Protection Act, which allowed government officials to forcibly
remove children from Aboriginal families. Subsequently, under
various legal pretexts, Aboriginal and mixed-race children were
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removed from Aboriginal families and placed in group homes or
with white adoptive families to facilitate assimilation into white
Australian culture from 1869 until the 1970s. In 1981, the
Australian historian Peter Read published a book called The
Stolen Generations that made the historical phenomenon of
Australian Aboriginal children taken from their families by the
government much more widely known.
RELATED LITERARY WORKS
In Catching Teller Crow, Isobel Catching draws on stories her
mother told her about her Aboriginal ancestors to find
resilience in the face of brutal abuse. Authors Ambelin and
Ezekiel Kwaymullina are the children of Sally Jane Morgan, an
author whose autobiography for children, My Place (1987),
relatedly involves the young Morgan learning about her
Aboriginal heritage and the life stories of her Aboriginal
forebears. In addition, Catching Teller Crow is narrated by a
ghost, Beth Teller, who was killed in a car accident before the
story takes place. Other novels narrated by dead people
include Alice Sebold’s The Lov
Lovely
ely Bones (2002), whose narrator
was raped and murdered at age 14 and subsequently watches
over her family’s grief from heaven, and David Levithan’s Two
Boys Kissing (2013), a love story between two boys whose
narrators are a group of gay men killed by HIV/AIDs. Finally, in
Catching Teller Crow, teenage Isobel Catching uses the device of
a fantastical allegory to narrate the brutal, likely sexual, abuse
she suffered at the hands of local rich man Alexander Sholt and
police chief Derek Bell. Another Young Adult novel that uses
fantasy tropes to indirectly represent child abuse and its
aftermath is Stephanie Kuehn’s Charm & Strange (2013), whose
protagonist remembers his molestation by his abusive father in
allegorical form, as his father becoming a violent werewolf.
KEY FACTS
• Full Title: Catching Teller Crow
• When Published: 2018
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Young Adult Novel, Fantasy
• Setting: A small town in Australia
• Climax: Catching tells Beth and Michael how she and Crow
defeated the Feed.
• Antagonist: Alexander Sholt, Derek Bell
• Point of View: First Person
EXTRA CREDIT
Awarded. In 2019, Catching Teller Crow won the Victorian
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Premier’s Prize for Writing for Young Adults.
Sibling Cooperation. In addition to co-authoring Catching Teller
Crow with her sibling Ezekiel, Ambelin Kwaymullina has co-
authored academic articles with her other sibling Blaze.
PL
PLO
OT SUMMARY
The only person who can see 15-year-old ghost Beth Teller is
her grieving father Michael Teller, a police detective in
Australia. When Michael is sent to investigate a burned corpse
found in a burned-down children’s home, Beth—who wants to
distract him from his grief—tries to convince him to take the
case seriously, though he believes the corpse is just Director
Cavanagh or Nurse Flint, the home’s only two employees.
When Michael’s phone rings, Beth suspects it’s Aunty Viv, her
dead Aboriginal mother’s sister, who was driving Beth to a
party when another car hit them, killing Beth. Michael won’t
talk to Aunty Viv, though she didn’t cause the accident.
Beth and Michael visit the burned-down children’s home,
where Beth sees a crow. Michael shows Beth photos of the
home, which include unhappy-looking children, Cavanagh, Flint,
and bespectacled Alexander Sholt, the rich man who donated
the building for the home. Beth suggests that they should talk
to the girl found on drugs near the home the night of the fire. At
the hospital, a sharp-featured Aboriginal girl, Isobel Catching,
flags Michael down, identifies herself as the witness, and brings
him to her hospital room, where she begins telling a story.
In Catching’s story, she and her mother are on a road trip
where her mother is teaching her to control her anger by
silently reciting the names of the Catching women, from her
great-great-grandmother to herself. Her mother has also told
her about the Catching women’s strengths, all of which
Catching has inherited. During the trip, a flood sweeps
Catching from their car. Catching uses the swimming power of
her great-grandmother—who swam home after the
government forcibly separated her from her Aboriginal
family—to survive, but later, she finds her mother’s corpse. She
cries herself to sleep. When she wakes, the world has gone
gray. Two creatures wearing masks, which call themselves
Fetchers, find Catching and abduct her into a series of tunnels.
Catching stops talking, and Michael leaves her alone. In the
hospital parking lot, Michael suggests to Beth that Catching’s
story represents her feelings about what happened to her, not
what literally happened. Beth, angry at Catching for not giving
Michael a truer story, phases back into Catching’s room to vent
at her—and is shocked to learn that Catching can see her.
Catching explains that her mother could see ghosts; since
Catching inherited all her female ancestors’ strengths,
Catching can see ghosts too. Catching asks Beth questions that
reveal Beth was moving on to an afterlife until Michael’s grief
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pulled her back. When Catching criticizes Michael, Beth gets so
angry that a lightbulb explodes. Catching explains that ghosts’
strong emotions can affect the physical world and tells Beth to
leave until she’s ready to talk about moving on.
The next morning, a call wakes Michael. It’s a police colleague
from the city, telling him that Cavanagh and Flint’s bank
accounts suggest they were being “paid off.” At the station,
police chief Derek Bell criticizes Michael for interviewing
witnesses before talking to the local police. When Michael asks
Derek about Alexander Sholt, Derek says that they went to
school together. Claiming that Alexander’s house is hard to find,
Derek asks his lieutenant Allie Hartley to take Michael there.
On the drive, Allie asks Michael to look at the file of her
childhood friend Sarah Blue, an Aboriginal girl who disappeared
20 years ago at age 14.
When they reach Alexander’s house, Alexander’s father
stonewalls Michael at the door. Meanwhile, Beth searches the
house and finds a smashed second-floor window with black
hairs stuck to the pane. As Beth and Michael walk back to the
car, Allie jumps out and tells Michael that she just got a call: two
more bodies have been found. Michael, Allie, and Beth drive to
the site where the bodies were dumped, a drain surrounded by
a locked fence. After Michael views the bodies with Derek, Allie
tells him that a woman who lives nearby claims to have heard a
winged creature flying overhead the night before. Beth blurts
“Fetchers” and teleports to Catching to make sure she’s okay.
Catching assures Beth that no Fetchers are coming for her but
thanks her for checking. Beth says, “It’s what fr—” but cuts
herself off before saying the word “friends.” Catching affirms
that she and Beth are friends, because she told Beth the hard
truth about needing to move on, and telling hard truths is what
friends do. Later, Michael arrives looking for Beth, and
Catching resumes her story.
In Catching’s story, a girl with long gray hair, gray eyes, and gray
skin emerges from the shadows of the room where the
Fetchers deposited Catching and introduces herself as Crow.
Crow explains that the Fetchers work for the Feed, a monster
that will eat Catching’s colors. Catching realizes that Crow is
gray because the Feed fed on her. The Fetchers bring Catching
to another room, where the Feed—a monster with mirrors for
eyes—rips open her abdomen, pulls colors out of her, and eats
them. After Catching is returned to her room, Crow informs
Catching that the Feed has killed many victims. She advises
Catching to become dead to avoid the pain. Instead, Catching
starts silently reciting the Catching women’s names. When she
forgets one, she asks Crow to help her by reciting relationship
words, e.g. Granny and Nanna, that will trigger memories.
Back in the hospital, Michael offers to protect Catching from
whoever hurt her, but Catching says it’s “too late.” In the
parking lot, Aunty Viv calls Michael again, but he doesn’t pick
up. When Beth tells him he’ll have to talk to Aunty Viv at
Grandpa Jim’s upcoming birthday party, he says he won’t
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attend—which makes Beth so angry that she runs straight
through the hospital and out the other side, where an ominous
shadow hovers over her. When Beth runs, the shadow chases
her. Beth, realizing she no longer has physical limitations,
sprints so fast she feels exhilarated—and then an afterlife of
bright colors appears before her, containing a presence she
recognizes as her dead mother. Beth infers that, since she has
felt this presence throughout her life, she can have
relationships with her family members even if she moves on
from the physical world. Then, sadly, she turns away from the
afterlife, because she doesn’t believe her grief-stricken father
can accept that kind of relationship. She weeps until nightfall.
The next morning, she sees Michael pondering a sticky note
with Sarah Blue’s name over it. He explains that the police got
away with doing a bad job investigating her disappearance
because she was Aboriginal—a fact that clearly bothers
Michael. Beth, thinking about how much Michael hates to be a
bystander to injustice, asks him whether he knows he couldn’t
have prevented her death. Miserably, Michael suggests that he
should have prevented it and admits that he’s avoiding his
beloved in-laws because he doesn’t feel like he deserves to
have a relationship with them when Beth is dead. When Beth
explains to him that he’s being hurtful to everyone, he promises
to “try.”
Michael goes back to the police station, only to discover that
Derek called Allie the night before saying he might not come to
work the next day. Worried and suspicious, Michael goes to
Derek’s house with Allie. When Michael breaks down Derek’s
locked door, they discover Derek dead of a stab wound.
Abruptly, Michael decides to go to the hospital. On the drive,
Michael asks whether Catching can see Beth. Beth admits it
and says she didn’t tell Michael because Catching wants Beth
to move on. Michael, surprised to learn that Beth can move on,
suggests that maybe she should.
At the hospital, Catching tells Michael and Beth the final part of
her story: Catching has become almost entirely gray. After a
Feed eats one of her last colors, Catching realizes that this
Feed didn’t have mirrors for eyes—there are two Feeds. Later,
Catching has a dream in which the Feeds’ prior victims instruct
her to name the gray and defeat it with its “opposite.” Crow
violently wakes Catching, telling Catching she almost died.
Suddenly, Catching sees black strands in Crow’s hair and
announces that colors can return. Crow, overwhelmed, lashes
out at Catching, scratching her—revealing that Catching’s
influence is helping Crow interact with the physical world.
Catching remembers that she felt “despair” when the Feed first
ate her colors; when she counteracts that despair with hope,
she sheds some gray on her arm. Catching tells Crow that they
will regain their colors and stop the Feeds. Crow and Catching
work on shedding their grayness. When the Fetchers arrive to
get Catching, the girls smash the Fetchers’ masks, revealing
voids underneath. Then they chase the mirror-eyed Feed out of
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the tunnels. He hides in a locked cage full of birds, but Crow’s
hair becomes winglike, blowing the cage door off. The birds fly
free. As Catching and Crow advance on the Feed, he
transforms into a man with glasses. Then the “world explodes.”
After finishing her story, Catching tells Michael that “it” is 100
steps “west.” Michael and Beth drive to the children’s home; on
the way, Michael calls Allie and asks her to meet them there.
One hundred steps west of the home, Michael finds the hatch
to a bunker. He motions Beth to stay aboveground while he and
Allie investigate. Beth sees glasses abandoned on the ground
nearby—and realizes that the “tunnels” in Catching’s story
were the bunker, the birds were the children in the home, and
bespectacled Alexander Sholt was a Feed. Allie and Michael
emerge from the bunker and discuss what they’ve found: the
bunker held kidnapped girls, and Derek’s jacket was down
there. Beth realizes Derek must have been the other Feed.
Alexander was paying Cavanagh and Flint to keep quiet and
maybe procure victims from the children’s home. Michael tells
Allie that he thinks Alexander and Derek have been kidnapping,
abusing, and murdering girls since high school—and that her
friend Sarah Blue was their first victim.
After Allie leaves, Catching abruptly appears, carrying a crow
that Beth now recognizes as Crow, Sarah Blue’s ghost.
Catching explains that Crow saw Beth at the children’s home
the first day Beth and Michael arrived and that she decided to
tell Beth her own story to help Beth move on. When Michael
asks Catching not to kill anyone else now that Alexander,
Derek, Cavanagh, and Flint are dead, Beth explains that
Catching didn’t kill anyone—Crow did. She dragged Cavanagh
and Flint out a second-story window, dropped their bodies into
a locked area from above, and entered Derek’s locked house
through the chimney. Beth realizes that Catching has the
power to travel between realities and can help ghosts like Beth
and Crow travel as well. When Catching invites Beth to travel
with her and Crow to the colorful afterlife, Beth agrees. She
says goodbye to her father—who decides to go to Grandpa
Jim’s birthday party and calls Aunty Viv—and flies away with
Catching and Crow to meet her mother in the afterlife.
CHARA
CHARACTERS
CTERS
MAJOR CHARACTERS
Beth TTeller
eller – Beth Teller is a 15-year-old Australian ghost:
while her mother’s sister Aunty Viv was driving Beth to a party,
another car struck them, killing Beth. Beth inherited her blue
eyes from her father, police detective Michael Teller, and her
brown skin and dark, curling hair from her mother, an
Aboriginal woman who died when Beth was an infant. After
Beth died, she was traveling toward an afterlife full of colors
until she heard her father crying and returned to him. When
the novel begins, Michael is the only person who can see Beth.
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Beth grieves her lost future and feels trapped in the physical
world—but she represses her own pain to care for her grief-
stricken father, encouraging him to concentrate on the
potential homicide that he has been sent to investigate in a
small Australian town. When Michael interviews a witness in
the hospital, mysterious teenager Isobel Catching, Catching
begins telling him a fantastical, allegorical story about what
happened to her rather than the literal truth. Afterward, Beth
learns that Catching can see her too and believes she needs to
move on to the afterlife. At first, Beth resists Catching’s insight.
As Catching continues to tell Michael and Beth the story of her
abuse and escape with the help of a teenaged ghost named
Crow—Catching and Beth’s friendship grows. Ultimately,
Catching reveals that Crow spotted Beth as soon as she came
to town with Michael; when Crow told Catching about this
other teenaged ghost, Catching decided to tell Beth her own
story to help Beth move on. Crow and Catching invite Beth to
visit the colorful afterlife with them. Beth, finally ready to move
on, says goodbye to her father and goes with the other girls to
reunite with her mother.
Isobel Catching – Isobel Catching, an Aboriginal Australian
teenager who goes by “Catching,” is the last victim of serial
killers Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell, who hold girls captive in
a secret bunker, abuse them, and murder them. When Catching
comes to the town where Alexander and Derek operate, she is
on a road trip with her mother, who has been teaching Catching
to control her anger and access her supernatural strengths by
reciting all the Catching women’s names, from Catching’s
great-great-grandmother down to Catching herself. After a
flash flood kills Catching’s mother and sweeps Catching away,
Alexander and Derek’s accomplices, Director Cavanagh and
Nurse Flint, find Catching and bring her to the bunker. There,
Catching befriends Crow/Sarah Blue, the ghost of Alexander
and Derek’s first victim. Despite the traumatic abuse that
Alexander and Derek inflict on Catching (which is strongly
implied to be sexual), she resolves to survive. When the girls
realize that Catching’s supernatural powers allow Crow to
influence the physical world, the girls resolve to escape
together. They end up burning down the children’s home from
which Alexander and Derek have been harvesting victims,
where Crow also kills Alexander. When the burned remains
bring detective Michael Teller and his ghost daughter, 15-year-
old Beth Teller, to the town, Catching tells them about her
abuse in a fantastical allegory in which Cavanagh and Flint are
creatures called Fetchers, while Alexander and Derek are
monsters called Feeds, which kill by eating all the bright colors
out of their victims’ bodies until they turn gray and die. While
Catching’s story helps Michael’s investigation, Catching really
tells it to help Beth move on from the physical world.
Ultimately, Catching—who can move between worlds—travels
with Crow and Beth to the afterlife to visit their dead loved
ones.
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Crow/Sar
Crow/Sarah ah Blue – Sarah Blue was an Aboriginal girl living in a
rural Australian town who talked a lot with her best friend Allie
Hartley about leaving home, perhaps becoming an astronaut to
get as far away as possible. Sarah was the first victim of serial
killers Derek Bell and Alexander Sholt, older students at Sarah’s
school who kidnapped, abused, and murdered her when she
was 14. The local police chief, Derek’s father Gerry Bell, failed
to investigate Sarah’s disappearance thoroughly, perhaps
because he suspected or knew that his son was involved. After
death, Sarah Blue becomes a traumatized ghost, calling herself
Crow, who haunts the bunker where Derek and Alexander hold
their victims captive. Crow, who appears as a
monochromatically gray girl with unnaturally long nails, feels so
hopeless about subsequent captives’ survival that she thinks
they should die as quickly as possible to avoid the pain of Derek
and Alexander’s abuse. About 20 years after Crow’s death,
Derek and Alexander’s final captive, the resilient Isobel
Catching, befriends Crow and asks Crow to help her
psychologically withstand the abuse. Catching’s friendship
breaks through Crow’s emotional numbness, while the powers
that Catching inherited from her female Aboriginal ancestors
help Crow interact with the physical world again. With
Catching’s help, Crow sheds her grayness, escapes the bunker,
and systematically kills Alexander, Derek, and two of their
accomplices, Director Cavanagh and Nurse Flint. Crow—who
can now transform into a large crow—spies the ghost of Beth
Teller when her father, detective Michael Teller, comes to
investigate Crow’s first murder. When she informs Catching
about Beth, Catching—who has the power to travel between
realities—decides to help Beth move on from the physical
world. At the novel’s end, Crow, Catching, and Beth travel to
the afterlife together to visit their dead relatives.
Beth
Beth’s’s Dad/Michael T Teller
eller – Blond, muscular Michael Teller, an
experienced Australian detective, grew up in a small town
where his bigoted father was the police chief. When Michael
began dating an Aboriginal woman—whom he later married
and with whom he had a daughter, Beth Teller—his parents
disowned him. Perhaps as a result, Michael is intensely
bothered by racism and by injustice in general. After his wife
dies, he and Beth remain close to his wife’s family—yet after
15-year-old Beth dies in a car accident while his wife’s sister
Aunty Viv is driving her to a party, Michael pulls away from his
loving in-laws. His grief over Beth is so intense that it prevents
Beth’s ghost from moving on to the afterlife; after death, Beth
returns to the physical world to comfort him. When the novel
begins, a government oversight program has sent Michael to
review a possible homicide at a burned-down children’s home
in a rural town that reminds Michael unpleasantly of his own
hometown. Michael is distrustful of the local police chief, Derek
Bell, but befriends Derek’s second-in-command, Allie Hartley,
who asks Michael to review the 20-year-old disappearance of
her childhood friend Sarah Blue, an Aboriginal girl who
disappeared at age 14. After conducting interviews with
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mysterious teenaged witness Isobel Catching, Michael realizes
that Derek Bell and local rich man Alexander Sholt have been
kidnapping, abusing, and murdering teenage girls for decades.
Focusing on getting justice for Derek and Alexander’s victims
helps Michael move past his guilt and grief over Beth’s death.
When the story ends, he says a loving goodbye to Beth, who
plans to travel to the afterlife; he himself plans to hunt down all
Alexander and Derek’s accomplices with Allie and to reconnect
with his in-laws.
Allie Hartle
Hartleyy – Freckly, redheaded Allie Hartley is the second-
in-command to local police chief Derek Bell in the rural
Australian town where they both grew up. As an adolescent,
Allie talked a lot with her best friend Sarah Blue about moving
away and chasing their dreams—but after Sarah Blue
disappeared at age 14, Allie stayed in town and became a police
officer, obsessed with finding her friend alive one day. About 20
years later, when seasoned detective Michael Teller comes to
town to investigate a possible homicide, Allie asks him to
review the file on Sarah Blue’s disappearance. When Michael
points out that the file is oddly thin, Allie agrees and tells him
she thinks that the police chief at the time, Derek’s father
Gerry Bell, didn’t investigate thoroughly because he believed
Sarah had just run away and would turn up soon. Eventually,
with help from mysterious teenager Isobel Catching and the
ghost of Michael’s 15-year-old daughter Beth Teller, Michael
finds the bunker where serial killer Alexander Sholt and his
partner have been holding girls captive before murdering
them—and Allie, investigating the bunker with him, recognizes
Derek’s jacket inside. Allie is devastated by the twin revelations
that she, a trained police officer, didn’t realize her boss and
colleague was a serial killer and that her friend Sarah was likely
Alexander and Derek’s first victim. At first, Allie seems poised
to crumble under the weight of her grief and horror—but when
Michael tells her that she should focus on getting justice for
Alexander and Derek’s victims by hunting down their
accomplices, Allie’s commitment to legal justice and her long-
ago friendship with Sarah strengthen her, and she resolves to
keep doing her job.
Derek Bell – Blond, hazel-eyed Derek Bell is the current police
chief and son of the former police chief Gerry Bell in a rural
Australian town. He’s also a serial killer: since high school, he
and his classmate, local heir Alexander Sholt, have been holding
girls captive in a secret bunker, abusing them, and murdering
them. Derek’s father Gerry fails to properly investigate the
disappearance of their first victim, 14-year-old Aboriginal girl
Sarah Blue—and racism against Aboriginal people helps him get
away with it, which suggests both that racism plagues law
enforcement in Australia and that Gerry may have suspected
his son’s involvement in the disappearance. After Sarah Blue’s
ghost, who now calls herself Crow, escapes the bunker with the
help of their last victim, Isobel Catching, Crow kills Alexander
Sholt and burns down the children’s home that he founded and
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from which he has been harvesting some victims. When
detective Michael Teller comes to investigate Alexander Sholt’s
as-yet-unidentified, burned body, Derek Bell tries to use his
authority as police chief to hinder Michael’s investigation and
to get his lieutenant, Sarah Blue’s childhood best friend Allie
Hartley, to spy on Michael. After Crow kills Alexander and
Derek’s accomplices Director Cavanagh and Nurse Flint,
employees at Alexander’s children’s home, Derek becomes
paranoid and locks himself inside his house—but Crow flies in
and kills him. In Catching’s fantastical allegory of the abuse she
suffered at Alexander and Derek’s hands, she describes Derek
as one of two monsters called Feeds, who eat the colors out of
their victims’ bodies till the victims turn entirely gray and die.
When Michael and Allie find the bunker where Catching was
held captive, they discover Derek’s jacket inside—revealing to
Michael and his daughter Beth Teller, who also heard
Catching’s story, that Derek was the second Feed.
Ale
Alexander
xander Sholt – Alexander Sholt, a skinny man with glasses,
is the heir of a rich family in a rural Australian town. Alexander’s
grandfather was obsessed with the apocalypse and built a
secret bunker in the woods west of a house the Sholts owned.
As teenagers, Alexander and his classmate Derek Bell began
kidnapping teenage girls, holding them captive in the bunker,
abusing them (probably in a sexual manner, though the novel
never makes this explicit), and murdering them. Later,
Alexander turns the home near the bunker into a children’s
home and bribes the home’s employees, Director Cavanagh
and Nurse Flint, to procure victims for them from among the
home’s residents. Alexander’s first victim, 14-year-old Sarah
Blue, becomes a ghost called Crow. When their last victim,
supernaturally powerful teenage girl Isobel Catching, befriends
Crow and enables her to interact with the physical world, the
girls confront Alexander, chase him to the children’s home, and
free the children. Then Crow kills Alexander and burns down
the home. The mystery of Alexander’s burned, unidentified
corpse brings detective Michael Teller and his 15-year-old
daughter, ghost Beth Teller, to the town, triggering the main
events of the novel. When Isobel Catching narrates her
captivity to Michael and Beth as a fantastical allegory, she
describes Alexander as a “Feed,” a monster with mirrors for
eyes that devours all the colors inside girls until they turn
entirely gray and die.
Director TTom
om Ca
Cavanagh/First
vanagh/First FFetcher
etcher – A short man with a
beard, Director Cavanagh oversees operations and teaches
classes at the children’s home that serial killer Alexander Sholt
founded in his rural Australian hometown. The children’s home
is located near the bunker where Alexander and fellow serial
killer Derek Bell hold girls captive, abuse them, and eventually
murder them. When Alexander and Derek’s final victim Isobel
Catching escapes from the bunker, the allegorical tale of her
abuse that she narrates to detective Michael Teller—in which
two masked creatures named Fetchers, who call themselves
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“First” and “Second,” bring girls to be assaulted and devoured
by two monsters called Feeds—indicates that Director
Cavanagh and his colleague Nurse Flint were paid to bring
victims to Alexander and Derek. As Director Cavanagh
outranked Nurse Flint and “First” outranks “Second,” readers
can infer that Director Cavanagh is the First Fetcher. When
Catching escapes the bunker, she brings with her the ghost of
Alexander and Derek’s first victim, Sarah Blue/Crow, whom
Catching has empowered to interact with the physical world.
Shortly thereafter, Crow finds Director Cavanagh and Nurse
Flint hiding out at the Sholt family home, kills them, and dumps
their bodies near where Alexander and Derek first abducted
her. When detective Michael Teller realizes Director Cavanagh
and Nurse Flint’s involvement in the serial killings, he
speculates that both men were morally vacuous, empty
inside—a judgment that the novel represents symbolically in
Catching’s story: she describes the Fetchers as having no faces,
only voids, beneath their humanoid masks.
Nurse Martin Flint/Second F Fetcher
etcher – A tall man with unkempt
hair, Nurse Flint provides medical care for the children at the
children’s home that serial killer Alexander Sholt founded in his
rural Australian hometown. The children’s home is located near
the bunker where Alexander and fellow serial killer Derek Bell
hold girls captive, abuse them, and eventually murder them.
When Alexander and Derek’s final victim Isobel Catching
escapes from the bunker, the allegorical tale of her abuse that
she narrates to detective Michael Teller—in which two masked
creatures named Fetchers, who call themselves “First” and
“Second,” bring girls to be assaulted and devoured by two
monsters called Feeds—indicates that Nurse Flint and his
colleague Director Cavanagh were paid to bring victims to
Alexander and Derek. As “Second” heals the captives before the
Feeds assault them, readers can infer that medical professional
Nurse Flint is Second. When Catching escapes the bunker, she
brings with her the ghost of Alexander and Derek’s first victim,
Sarah Blue/Crow, whom Catching has empowered to interact
with the physical world. Shortly thereafter, Crow finds Nurse
Flint and Director Cavanagh hiding out at the Sholt family
home, murders them, and dumps their bodies near where
Alexander and Derek first abducted her. When detective
Michael Teller realizes Nurse Flint and Director Cavanagh’s
involvement in the serial killings, he speculates that both men
were morally vacuous, empty inside—a judgment that the novel
represents symbolically in Catching’s story: she describes the
Fetchers as having no faces, only voids, beneath their humanoid
masks.
Aunty Viv – Aunty Viv, aunt to Beth Teller, sister-in-law to
Michael Teller, and sister to Aunty June, was driving 15-year-
old Beth to a birthday party in the rain when another car
skidded and struck them, killing Beth. Though Aunty Viv is a
vivacious woman who loves nail polish, high heels, and bright
colors, she becomes so grief-stricken in the aftermath of Beth’s
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
death that she starts wearing gray tracksuits and flats. When
Michael refuses to talk to her after the accident, she shows up
at his door and yells that she wishes she had died instead of
Beth. Although Aunty Viv can’t see or hear Beth’s ghost, she
snaps out of her paralyzing grief when Beth’s ghost yells at her
not to “fall[] apart” like Michael has—hinting that ghosts can
communicate with the living indirectly, even when the living
can’t hear them. Afterward, Aunty Viv starts wearing bright
colors again and keeps calling Michael, even though he won’t
pick up the phone. Aunty Viv models a healthier way to pass
through paralyzing grief that benefits her brother-in-law in the
end, too.
Aunty June – Aunty June, aunt to Beth Teller and sister-in-law
to Michael Teller, loves athletic clothes, health food, and
exercise, in contrast with her sister Aunty Viv, who loves high
heels and dessert. Aunty June nicknames Beth “butterfly girl”
due to her joyous focus on the present moment; after Beth
dies, Aunty Beth chooses to grieve Beth with “laughter,” telling
Beth’s cousins funny stories about Beth’s life. As a ghost, Beth
prefers Aunty June’s happy memorials to her father Michael’s
obsessive grief and imagines that Aunty June would be
disappointed with her for haunting Michael rather than moving
on to the afterlife. Beth’s respect for Aunty June’s healthy
grieving process and her worry that Aunty June would
disapprove of her continued presence in the physical world
foreshadow Beth’s decision to travel to the afterlife at the
novel’s end.
Gerry Bell – Gerry Bell, father to Derek Bell, is a retired police
chief in the rural Australian town where his son Derek, the
current police chief, and Derek’s high school classmate
Alexander Sholt have been kidnapping, abusing, and murdering
girls for about 20 years. Gerry Bell botched the investigation
into the disappearance of Alexander and Derek’s first victim, a
14-year-old Aboriginal girl named Sarah Blue; at the time, no
one held him to account for his failure, the way they would have
if Sarah had been white, due to widespread racism. When a
government oversight program sends out-of-town detective
Michael Teller to investigate a possible homicide, Sarah Blue’s
childhood best friend and current police officer Allie Hartley
asks Michael to review the case file that Gerry compiled on
Sarah’s murder. After Michael and Allie discover that Derek
and Alexander are serial killers, they come to suspect that
Gerry botched the investigation into Sarah’s disappearance on
purpose and plan to hold him legally responsible.
MINOR CHARACTERS
Rachel Ali – Rachel Ali is police detective Michael Teller’s boss.
She sends him to oversee the investigation into a possible
homicide in a rural Australian town because she wants to give
him an “easy assignment” while he’s grieving the accidental
death of his 15-year-old daughter Beth Teller.
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THEMES
In LitCharts literature guides, each theme gets its own color-
coded icon. These icons make it easy to track where the themes
occur most prominently throughout the work. If you don't have
a color printer, you can still use the icons to track themes in
black and white.
TRAUMA AND GRIEF
In Catching Teller Crow, trauma and grief paralyze
characters, preventing growth and change. It is only
by drawing on strong relationships with others that
characters can move beyond their trauma and grief. This
dynamic is clear in the interrelationships of Sarah Blue/Crow,
Isobel Catching, Beth Teller, and Michael Teller. Crow is the
ghost of a 14-year-old Aboriginal Australian girl, Sarah Blue,
who was kidnapped, abused, and murdered by two older
teenagers, Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell, 20 years before the
main events of the story. Over the decades, Alexander and
Derek continue kidnapping girls, abusing them in a secret
bunker, and killing them. Crow, haunting the bunker, is so
traumatized by her own abuse and murder that for 20 years
she feels powerless to help Alexander and Derek’s subsequent
victims—except by advising them to become emotionally numb
to the abuse until they can finally die. It is only after she forges
a strong relationship with the latest kidnapped victim, Isobel
Catching, that Crow begins to heal from her own trauma.
Trying to stay strong, Catching recites the relationship names
of all the Catching women, from her great-great-grandmother
to herself (e.g. “Granny,” “Nanna,” “Grandma,” “Mum,” “Me”) and
asks Crow to help her not forget by reciting them with her.
Crow begins reciting not only Catching’s relationships but her
own. These remembered relationships, together with Crow
and Catching’s new bond, help Crow heal—a process
symbolized by her shedding her monochromatic gray
coloring—and evolve, becoming able to physically affect the
world and help Catching escape the bunker.
In the same vein, police detective Michael Teller is so grief-
stricken by the accidental death of his daughter, 15-year-old
Beth, that he can’t remember their past relationship with any
happiness or interact normally with his beloved in-laws. His
grief keeps Beth haunting the physical world. It is only when the
father and daughter meet and befriend the escaped Catching
that Michael and Beth can move beyond the trap of his
obsessive grief: Michael gains a new purpose in bringing to
justice the people who enabled the abuse and murder of Crow,
Catching, and other girls, while Beth gains a trusted advisor
who eventually convinces her to travel beyond a physical world
where she no longer belongs. Through Crow, Catching,
Michael, and Beth, the novel illustrates that strong
relationships are vital in helping people trapped in trauma and
grief to heal, evolve, and move on.
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
ABUSE OF POWER, RACISM, AND THE
LAW
In Catching Teller Crow, racist power structures
enable the abuse of Australian Aboriginal people,
particularly girls—and while the law sometimes holds abusers
to account, it often perpetuates injustice. From the late 1860s
into the 1970s, the Australian government passed laws and
policies encouraging the forcible removal of children from their
Aboriginal families to facilities (or, sometimes, adoptive
families) that tried to assimilate the children to white Australian
culture. While the novel takes place after these government
practices have ceased, they hang over the novel, as major
character Isobel Catching’s Aboriginal great-grandmother
Sadie and grandmother Leslie were both taken from their
mothers by the government. Moreover, violence against
Aboriginal girls tacitly condoned by the police forms a major
part of the novel’s plot. Twenty years before the story’s main
events take place, white teenagers Alexander Sholt and Derek
Bell kidnap, abuse, and murder a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl
named Sarah Blue. Gerry Bell, the local police chief and Derek’s
father, intentionally botches the investigation into Sarah’s
disappearance—and gets away with it because Sarah is
Aboriginal, not white. Derek becomes the police chief after his
father to help cover up his own crimes against girls—and when
Alexander and Derek kidnap Isobel Catching 20 years later, she
psychologically withstands their abuse by remembering her
female ancestors’ strength in the face of white colonization and
the government’s assaults on Aboriginal family integrity,
drawing a parallel between the government’s legal persecution
of Aboriginal people and Alexander and Derek’s predation of
Aboriginal girls. While detective Michael Teller and local police
officer Allie Hartley eventually discover Alexander and Derek’s
crimes and seek justice for their victims, the novel presents
them as unusually moral and anti-racist police officers due to
their relationships with Aboriginal people: Michael’s beloved
daughter Beth is Aboriginal, and Allie’s childhood best friend
was Alexander and Derek’s first victim Sarah. Thus, the novel
suggests that while individual police officers can be just and
moral, Australian law and policing have historically been racist
in a way that enabled and continues to enable abuses of power
against Aboriginal people.
STORYTELLING AND TRUTH
In Catching Teller Crow, storytelling is not deception.
Rather, it is a way of telling the truth non-literally
when the literal truth is too traumatic for the
storyteller to describe or too blunt for the listener to accept.
The novel deals with two men, rich heir Alexander Sholt and
local police chief Derek Bell, kidnapping, abusing, and
murdering girls in a small Australian town. Their final victim,
Isobel Catching, escapes and burns down the “children’s home”
from which Alexander and Derek have been harvesting victims,
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with help from the ghost of the first victim, Sarah Blue/Crow;
on the same night, Crow kills Alexander. Afterward, Crow spots
the ghost of 15-year-old Beth Teller following her father,
detective Michael Teller, to the scene of Alexander’s murder,
and tells Catching about it.
In an attempt to help Beth move on, Catching poses as a
witness to the fire and narrates the story of her kidnapping,
abuse, and escape to Beth and Michael as a kind of fantastical
allegory: the children’s home staff who brought Alexander and
Derek victims, Director Cavanagh and Nurse Flint, become
faceless, batlike creatures called Fetchers, Alexander and
Derek become spindly white monsters called Feeds, and the
abuse that Alexander and Derek visited upon their victims
before killing them—which is strongly implied to be sexual in
nature—becomes “eating the colors” out of their victims until
they turn entirely gray. Catching wants “to be heard,” but she
finds her story, even in allegorical form, very difficult to narrate,
which suggests that she allegorizes the events she suffered to
communicate the truth non-literally, indirectly enough that the
narration won’t retraumatize her. Similarly, Catching wants to
help Beth move on from the physical world, where she no
longer belongs—but Beth responds badly to Catching’s bluntly
stated advice, whereas Catching’s fantastical story of trauma
and resilience eventually convinces Beth that she needs to
leave her grieving father behind and move on for both their
sakes. Thus, the novel suggests that stories can be essentially
“true” even when their details are invented—and that
sometimes, telling the truth through invented details is
healthier and more effective than simply stating facts.
TIME
In Catching Teller Crow, linear clock-time is a
misleading way of organizing reality. In the world of
the novel, people should understand time as an
index of their growth and progress: if they aren’t growing and
changing, they aren’t really moving forward, even if the clock-
hands keep ticking. This understanding of time is exemplified in
Beth Teller and her father Michael Teller. Beth is a ghost,
eternally 15 years old and always wearing the dress she had on
when a car lost control in the rain and killed her. She remains
haunting the physical world due to her father Michael’s
obsessive grief, which called her back to the physical plane
when she was about to move on. When the novel begins, Beth
feels responsible for helping Michael return to the healthier
psychological state he occupied before her death, so she tries
to act as alive and happy as possible, not phasing through solid
objects or crying where he can see. Beth’s unchanging physical
appearance represents how her father’s grief is preventing her
from accepting a dramatic change in her existence, i.e., her
death, and progressing to an afterlife more appropriate to her
new state. Though clock-time continues to move forward, Beth
does not—until she realizes that remaining stuck in the living
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
world with her father, half-pretending that she’s still alive, is
psychologically unhealthy for both of them. This realization
forces Beth to grow, change, and eventually move on. As Beth
leaves the physical plane for the afterlife, she gains the ability
to transform from a changeless ghost into a bright streak of
yellow. That is to say, Beth’s appearance becomes capable of
change only when she takes a dramatic step forward in her
existence—suggesting that time is best measured by personal
growth, not seconds and hours.
FEMALE FRIENDSHIP
In Catching Teller Crow, all positive relationships are
important—but friendships between girls are
particularly meaningful, because they help
vulnerable young women fight back against gendered violence.
The novel’s main villains, Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell, have
been kidnapping, abusing, and murdering girls in the same small
Australian town for about 20 years. They are finally stopped
when their last victim, Isobel Catching, befriends the ghost of
their first victim, Sarah Blue/Crow. Catching’s influence helps
Crow interact with the physical world, while Crow’s support
helps Catching stay emotionally resilient and ready to fight in
the face of Alexander and Derek’s horrific abuse. Eventually,
Catching and Crow escape—and Crow kills Alexander and
Derek.
Female friendship not only stops Alexander and Derek’s abuse
and murder of vulnerable girls; it also brings Alexander and
Derek’s crimes to the attention of police officers who intend to
bring Alexander and Derek’s accomplices to justice. Sarah Blue/
Crow’s childhood best friend, Allie Hartley, has become a police
officer as an adult; readers can infer that Allie joined her
hometown’s police force at least partly because she wanted to
solve the mystery of her friend’s disappearance. When a
government oversight program for homicide cases brings
seasoned detective Michael Teller to town after Alexander’s
murder, Allie asks him to look into Sarah Blue’s long-ago
disappearance too. Meanwhile, Catching has been befriending
the ghost of Michael’s daughter, Beth Teller; Allie’s devotion to
Sarah and Beth’s new friendship with Catching yield
information that eventually leads Michael to discover where
Alexander and Derek likely buried the girls they killed and who
likely helped them hide their crimes. As the novel ends, Michael
and Allie are planning to find the bodies and pursue the
accomplices. Thus, the strong female friendships between
Catching and Sarah Blue/Crow, Sarah Blue/Crow and Allie, and
Beth and Catching are ultimately instrumental in ending a cycle
of violence against girls and in bringing those responsible to
justice. Indeed, the novel suggests that female friendship is an
incredibly potent force for building solidarity, speaking truth,
and fighting for justice in the world more broadly.
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SYMBOLS
Symbols appear in teal text throughout the Summary and
Analysis sections of this LitChart.
GRAY VS. INTENSE COLORS
In Catching Teller Crow, the color gray symbolizes
unhealthy psychological paralysis caused by trauma
and grief, whereas intense colors—yellow, green, blue, black,
red, and so on—represent a psychologically healthy capacity for
joy and growth despite traumatic experiences. This symbolism
plays out most obviously in the story that Isobel Catching tells
police detective Michael Teller and his 15-year-old daughter
Beth, a ghost. Catching, having undergone a hugely traumatic
experience, refuses to narrate what happened to her in direct,
literal language. Instead, she tells Michael and Beth that she
was kidnapped by fantastical beasts, winged and faceless,
called Fetchers, who held her captive while two monsters called
Feeds slowly and violently devoured all the colors in her body,
turning her gray. Her only friend in captivity, a gray ghost
named Crow who was the Feeds’ first victim, initially
encouraged her to become gray and dead as a way of numbing
her pain. It was only after Catching realized that she could
banish the gray and regain her intense colors by summoning
positive emotions, such as memories of courage or hopeful
dreams of the future, that she regained the psychological
strength to escape and confront the Feeds. The novel later
reveals that the monstrous Feeds were, in fact, local rich man
Alexander Sholt and police chief Derek Bell, who have been
kidnapping, holding captive, and eventually murdering teenage
girls for approximately 20 years. Given this context, the novel
strongly implies that Isobel’s “turning gray” represents the
aftermath of repeated sexual assaults by two violent adult men,
a trauma that for a long time paralyzed her and Crow,
preventing them from fighting back. It is only once Catching
and Crow help each other regain their intense colors—that is,
claw back a sense of their capacity for growth—that they can
recognize their own power to fight back, escape their abusers,
and move on from what happened to them.
QUO
QUOTES
TES
Note: all page numbers for the quotes below refer to the
Penguin edition of Catching Teller Crow published in 2019.
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
Chapter 1. Beth: The Town Quotes
The ‘when’ didn’t matter so much though, since I didn’t
count minutes or hours any more. Days began when the sun
rose and ended when it set. In between, the connections I
made—like the ways I helped my dad, or didn’t help him—were
what told me if I was moving forwards or backwards. As my
Grandpa Jim had once said to me, Life doesn’t move through time,
Bethie. Time moves through life.
Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Beth’s Dad/
Michael Teller
Related Themes:
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis
15-year-old ghost Beth Teller is explaining that while she
thinks she’ll reunite with her long-dead mother someday,
“the ‘when’” isn’t important. On a superficial level, Beth is
suggesting that time doesn’t matter to her “any more [sic]”
because she’s a ghost who no longer ages. Yet on a deeper
level, she is also making a bold claim about objective clock-
time versus subjective, personal time.
The phrase that Beth remembers from her
grandfather—“Life doesn’t move through time, Bethie. Time
moves through life”—is a pithy statement about the
preeminence of personal, subjective time or clock-time.
Objective clock-time only moves forward, it always moves
at the same speed, and its movement can be measured by
standard units like “minutes or hours.” By contrast, Beth
measures her life’s progress subjectively: she can move
“forwards or backwards” depending on whether she forges
personal “connections” with others and aids the people
around her (particularly her father) or not. Objective time
keeps moving forward regardless of Beth’s successes and
failures—but for precisely that reason, it’s a misleading way
of measuring personal growth.
This early, striking statement about the preeminence of
personal time makes clear that Beth’s character will not
grow or mature simply in virtue of objective clock-time
moving forward. She will grow as a person only if she
actively works to move “forwards” rather than “backwards”
in her own subjective accounting.
Dad said his old man thought the law was there to protect
some people and punish others. And Aboriginal people
were the ‘others.’
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Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Isobel Catching,
Crow/Sarah Blue, Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller, Derek Bell,
Alexander Sholt, Gerry Bell
Related Themes:
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis
Beth’s dad, detective Michael Teller, has just told Beth that
the town where he is currently investigating a possible
homicide reminds him of his hometown. This is a bad thing:
Beth knows that Michael’s father, the police chief in his
hometown, enforced the law in a biased, racist way—and
disowned Michael when Michael began dating an Aboriginal
woman, whom he eventually married and with whom he had
Beth. This quotation, coming early in the novel,
foreshadows that both the history of racism against
Australian Aboriginal people and the threat of racist policing
will impact the novel’s main mystery.
The revelation that “Aboriginal people were the ‘others’” to
Michael’s bigoted father gestures to the history of white
colonialism and the oppression of Aboriginal people in
Australia. Aboriginal peoples had lived in Australia for tens
of thousands of years before the foundation of white British
colonies in Australia in the late 1700s. Yet white colonists
displaced Aboriginal Australians, exploited them
economically, oppressed them legally, and cast them as
Australian society’s “‘others’” despite their having lived in
Australia thousands of years longer than white Australians.
This context informs a major plot thread in the novel,
privileged white men Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell
preying on Aboriginal girls Sarah Blue and Isobel Catching.
Moreover, Alexander and Derek get away with preying on
girls for about 20 years because Derek’s father, police chief
Gerry Bell, fails to adequately investigate the disappearance
of their first victim, 14-year-old Aboriginal girl Sarah Blue.
Michael comes to suspect that Gerry intentionally botched
the case to protect Derek—but even if this theory isn’t
correct, Gerry’s lack of investment in protecting and getting
justice for a victimized Aboriginal girl enables Derek and
Alexander’s subsequent crimes.
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
Chapter 2. Beth: The Home Quotes
My science teacher said that just because two things
happened together didn’t mean one was because of the other,
or as she put it: ‘correlation does not imply causation.’
But Dad said that was scientist-talk not police-talk, and if two
things happened together you’d suspect the first thing caused
the second until it could provide you with an alibi.
Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Crow/Sarah
Blue, Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis
Beth and Michael are visiting the burned-down children’s
home where an unidentified corpse, a possible homicide
victim, was found. When Beth sees a crow, she waves at
it—and it flies away. Beth goes on to wonder whether her
wave and the crow’s flight were connected or not. Her
speculations introduce an idea that recurs throughout the
novel: stories aren’t lies but methods of organizing and
communicating information that can potentially lead a
person closer to the truth.
In this quotation, “scientist-talk” and “police-talk” are two
different ways of telling the story of Beth’s wave and the
crow’s flight. In the scientist’s version, “correlation does not
imply causation,” so the narrator, Beth, can’t say that her
wave caused the crow to fly away. In the police detective’s
version, events that occur in sequence usually have a causal
relationship: Beth’s wave did indeed cause the crow to fly
away, unless the crow can “provide […] an alibi” proving
otherwise. Since both scientists and detectives are cultural
authority figures, Beth isn’t necessarily saying that one
mode of storytelling is better than the other: she’s just
implying that what a person believes about facts (the wave,
the flight) depends on how they tell the story of those facts.
Later, Beth discovers that the crow was likely Crow, the
ghost of Sarah Blue, serial killers Alexander Sholt and Derek
Bell’s first victim. Since Crow can see Beth’s ghost, Beth’s
wave is likely to have caused Crow’s flight—and the novel
ultimately reveals itself to have been a detective story, not a
scientific story, all along.
And it’s OK to be sad, but you can’t love someone only with
tears. There’s got to be laughter too.
Related Characters: Aunty June (speaker), Beth Teller,
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Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
Related Themes:
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis
Teenaged ghost Beth has told a joke that makes her father
Michael laugh—only for him to stop laughing abruptly when
he remembers yet again that she’s dead. In her mind, Beth
contrasts Michael’s obsessive, wretched grief with her
Aunty June’s grieving process. Instead of focusing
exclusively on the sadness of Beth’s death, on “tears,” Aunty
June focuses on happy memories of Beth’s life as well,
telling Beth’s cousins a funny story about Beth adding salt
instead of sugar to a cake. Aunty June affirms Beth’s cousins
right “to be sad” in the aftermath of Beth’s death, but she
also encourages them to remember the necessity of
“laughter.”
The novel uses Aunty June’s healthy, balanced grief to
illustrate what is unhealthy about Michael Teller’s reaction
to Beth’s death. Whereas Aunty June is capable of both
“tears” and “laughter,” Michael hugs his misery stubbornly,
unwilling to keep laughing now that his daughter is dead.
Whereas Aunty June intentionally remembers—and retells
for others—happy events in Beth’s life, Michael remains
fixated on the moment of her death. This contrast suggests
that grief has paralyzed Michael’s emotional life and that he
will only be able to heal by becoming more like Aunty June.
Clinging to his grief—the “tears”—keeps Michael from
healing.
Chapter 3. Beth: The Witness Quotes
“Maybe I didn’t see anything. Or maybe I did. Depends.”
“Depends on what?”
She looked at me—or, no, she didn’t, she looked into the space I
was standing in for a second, then away again. “On if you’ll
believe me.”
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Isobel Catching, Beth’s
Dad/Michael Teller (speaker), Crow/Sarah Blue, Derek Bell,
Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis
Michael and Beth visit the local hospital to interview a girl
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
with drugs in her system who may have witnessed the
children’s home burning down. At the hospital, Isobel
Catching identifies herself to Michael as the witness. He
asks her whether she saw the fire—and she tells him that
whether she saw anything depends on whether he’ll believe
her.
Catching’s response alludes to the impact of racism against
Aboriginal Australian people on the case. Catching is an
Aboriginal teenage girl whose story will eventually reveal
that she was kidnapped, held captive, and violently abused
by two privileged white men, one of whom—Derek Bell—is a
police officer. Her uncertainty about whether Michael,
another white police officer, will believe her story
emphasizes that Australian law enforcement is sometimes
racist against Aboriginal people and that this racism leads to
further injustices, such as disbelief of Aboriginal witnesses.
Catching’s response—and her brief glance at Beth, a
ghost—also alludes to the kind of story Catching will tell. In
the novel, the monsters are all too human, but ghosts are
also real. Catching’s story involves two serial killers,
Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell, and the ghost of their first
victim, Sarah Blue. Likely to avoid retraumatizing herself,
Catching chooses to narrate the (probably sexual) assaults
she suffered at Alexander and Derek’s hands as a fantastical
allegory, in which Alexander and Derek are bizarre
monsters called Feeds. Her question implicitly asks whether
Michael will be able to interpret her fantastical allegory
accurately, as a coded representation of real-world events,
and whether he’ll be able to accept the existence of ghosts
(which Michael and Beth don’t yet know Catching can
see).
Chapter 4. Catching: The Sunset Quotes
When your Nanna was little the government took her away
from her mum. They had a law back then that let them take
Aboriginal kids just because they were Aboriginal . . .
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Isobel Catching, Beth’s
Dad/Michael Teller, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis
Catching is telling Michael (and Beth) how she came to
witness the children’s home fire. In Catching’s story, she is
on a road trip with her mother when a flood wrecks their
car and sweeps Catching away. Catching thinks she’ll drown
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until she remembers the story her mother told her about
her “Nanna” (great-grandmother) Sadie, who swam back to
her family after government officials forcibly removed her
from her home. Here, Catching introduces the history of
Australian government assaults on Aboriginal family
integrity into the novel, thus placing its main plot about
white serial killers preying on Aboriginal girls in a larger
political frame.
Beginning in 1869 but becoming much more common in the
early 1900s, the Australian government enacted a series of
laws and policies that allowed government workers to
forcibly remove Aboriginal or mixed-race children from
their Aboriginal families. The children would then be placed
in group facilities or white foster homes. The purpose of
these laws and policies was to assimilate Aboriginal and
mixed-race children into ‘white’ Australian culture—a
violent erasure of Aboriginal culture and assault on
Aboriginal family integrity that did not stop until the 1970s.
Catching remembers this story as she’s drowning because
Sadie escaped the government workers and swam home;
Catching, having inherited Sadie’s prodigious swimming
abilities, fights her way to the flood’s surface. Here, the
novel parallels Catching’s fight for survival—which
eventually includes a battle with two white serial killers,
Alexander Sholt and police officer Derek Bell—with Sadie’s
escape from government workers attempting to break up
her family and force her to assimilate into white culture.
Thus, the novel subtly implies that a culture that would
attack Aboriginal families is the kind of culture that allows
serial killer like Alexander and Derek, white men who seem
to prey largely on Aboriginal girls, to get away with their
crimes. To survive, Catching must fight against anti-
Aboriginal racism as well as two violent, privileged white
men.
Chapter 7. Beth: The Truths Quotes
“Catching wasn’t lying. I know she wasn’t.”
“I don’t think she was lying, precisely. Just telling the truth in a
different way.”
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
(speaker), Isobel Catching, Director Tom Cavanagh/First
Fetcher, Nurse Martin Flint/Second Fetcher
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
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Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis
Michael and Beth have left Catching, a witness to the
children’s home fire, to rest after hearing the first part of
her story, in which Catching’s mother drowns. On their way
out of the hospital, Michael asks a nurse whether anyone
has visited the witness, and the nurse tells him that child
protective services has only just located the witness’s
mother, who will come pick the witness up in about a week.
In the parking lot, Beth and Michael discuss whether
Catching’s story was true. When Beth insists that Catching
was telling the truth, Michael introduces the concept of
“telling the truth in a different way,” which will be crucial to
understanding Catching’s story.
Parts of Catching’s story are literally true, but parts of them
will turn out to be a fantastical allegory: for example, the
faceless creatures called Fetchers that first kidnap Catching
are an allegorical representation of Cavanagh and Flint,
morally vacuous men paid to find victims for serial killers
Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell. Similarly, the spindly white
monsters called Feeds, who eat the bright colors out of
Catching’s body until she turns gray, are allegorical
representations of Alexander and Derek. These men
repeatedly assault (likely in a sexual way) their female
victims, traumatizing them and damaging their ability to feel
positive emotions, before eventually murdering them.
Michael’s concept of “telling the truth in a different way”
allows Beth (and readers) to eventually realize that
Catching isn’t lying about what happened to her: rather, she
is giving an allegorical account of real events that allows her
to express her moral judgment that Cavanagh, Flint,
Alexander, and Derek are monsters. Moreover, although the
novel doesn’t make this explicit, it implies that Catching tells
the story this way to avoid giving a graphic, literal account of
Alexander and Derek sexually assaulting her—a narration
that might retraumatize her. Thus, this quotation makes
clear that stories can be essentially true even when their
details are, for whatever reason, clearly allegorical or
symbolic inventions, not literal facts.
“That’s your plan now? Hang about and hold your dad’s
hand for the rest of his life?”
“No. Not exactly.” Even I could hear the lie in my voice.
She pointed to the door. “Get out of here, Teller. Come back if
you ever want help doing what you’re supposed to be doing and
move on.”
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Related Characters: Beth Teller, Isobel Catching (speaker),
Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
Related Themes:
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis
Teenage ghost Beth returns to Catching’s hospital room
without her dad Michael to vent her feelings about
Catching’s not-literally-true story—only for Catching to
reveal that she can see and hear ghosts, including Beth. The
two girls discuss why Beth is haunting Michael and when
she’ll move on to the afterlife. Catching’s insistence that
Beth should move on illuminates the novel’s
representations of what it means to heal from grief and of
powerful female friendships.
Catching believes that Beth shouldn’t just “hold [her] dad’s
hand for the rest of his life.” That is, she doesn’t think that
Beth should cater to her father’s paralyzing grief by staying
frozen in appearance at the moment of her death and
remaining in the physical world. This view suggests that
even if objective clock-time moves forward, Beth is standing
still if she doesn’t allow herself to grow, change, and do new
things—and standing still is fundamentally unhealthy. By
implication, grief is unhealthy if it fixes the grieving person’s
mind on a point in the past, not allowing future-oriented
hopes and goals—which is clearly the case with Michael’s
grief. Thus, Catching passes a negative judgment on both
Beth and Michael here.
Though Catching judges Beth’s choices negatively, she does
so only because she believes these choices are bad for Beth.
Thus, when she tells Beth to come back only to talk about
moving on, she is trying—albeit somewhat abrasively—to
help Beth. Catching’s attempt to care for Beth in this early
scene foreshadows the development of their powerful
friendship over the course of the novel.
Chapter 8. Beth: The Station Quotes
“It seems to me he might be a little like my father—the kind
of cop who thinks the rules don’t apply to everyone equally. He
could’ve been too deferential to the Sholt family, given them
special treatment . . . maybe let a few things slide about that
home that he now sees he should have looked into.”
Related Characters: Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller (speaker),
Beth Teller, Isobel Catching, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
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Page Number: 72-73
Explanation and Analysis
Michael, with Beth in tow, has gone to speak to police chief
Derek Bell at the local police station. Derek seems nervous
about Michael conducting an investigation of the body at
the children’s home. When Derek leaves the room, Michael
and Beth discuss his odd behavior. Beth guesses that Derek
is covering up drug dealing by local rich man Alexander
Sholt, who funded the home, but Michael points out that
Derek could be nervous because he “let a few things slide
about that home that he now sees he should have looked
into.”
Michael’s characterization of “the kind of cop who thinks
the rules don’t apply to everyone equally” suggests that
there are at least two ways law enforcement can perpetuate
injustice rather than serving justice. Catching’s story has
already referenced 19th- and 20th-century Australian laws
that encouraged the forcible removal of Aboriginal children
from their families. Such laws are an example of racial
injustice baked into a legal system; if police officers enforce
those laws, they are perpetuating injustice. On the other
hand, even when laws are just, police officers can
perpetuate injustice by not enforcing just laws “equally,” for
example by favoring rich white people like Alexander Sholt.
Thus, in this quotation, the novel emphasizes that the law
and law enforcement professionals can perpetuate injustice
in multiple ways.
As it turns out, Michael is telling an inaccurate hypothetical
story about Derek here: Derek is not just a biased police
officer who let Alexander’s suspicious behavior “slide” but a
participant in Alexander’s violent crimes against girls. Beth’s
story is also inaccurate: she correctly guesses that Derek
and Alexander are in league, but she supposes their crime is
drug-dealing, not kidnapping, assault, and murder. Yet in this
scene, both characters seek the truth by testing contrasting
stories against the available facts and seeing which story is
more convincing—illustrating how storytelling can be a tool
for seeking the truth in the absence of all the relevant facts.
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Chapter 9. Beth: The Missing Quotes
“Oh, it was a long time ago. Twenty years . . . seven months .
. . six days. Not that I’m counting!” She tried to laugh, but it
broke in the middle. “Sarah just vanished a week before her
fifteenth birthday. She got off the bus from school, same as
always, but she never made it home.”
[…]
Twenty years, seven months, six days . . . Was Dad going to be
like this, decades from now when he talked about me? I didn’t
want him making my death some kind of depressing
mathematical reference point for his life.
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Allie Hartley (speaker),
Crow/Sarah Blue, Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller, Gerry Bell
Related Themes:
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis
Local police officer Allie Hartley, chatting with Michael,
mentions that as an adolescent she wanted to leave town
but wouldn’t now, because her childhood best friend Sarah
Blue disappeared. When Michael asks follow-up questions
about the disappearance, Allie reveals that it happened
“twenty years . . . seven months . . . six days ago.” The
specificity of Allie’s answer reveals that, for more than two
decades, she has been counting the days since her best
friend’s disappearance, a ritual illustrating Allie’s intense
grief and the concomitant strength of her friendship with
Sarah.
When Beth wonders whether Michael will talk about her
death in this way “decades from now,” she draws a parallel
between Allie’s grief and Michael’s. In one respect, the two
characters are grieving in a similarly unhealthy way: both
feel subjectively stuck in time, drawn back to a “depressing
mathematical reference point” in the past when a person
they loved died, even as objective clock-time ticks on. Both
will eventually need to heal from their grief to grow as
people.
Yet Allie’s grief is importantly different from Michael’s in
another respect. Whereas Michael knows that Beth died
and how she died—in a random car accident no one could
have prevented—Allie has no idea what happened to Sarah.
Moreover, Allie believes that the investigation that former
police chief Gerry Bell performed into Sarah’s
disappearance was perfunctory and poorly handled. Given
that law enforcement failed to do justice to Sarah, Allie
legitimately feels that she can still help or serve her
friend—and shortly after this quotation, she takes action to
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
do so by asking seasoned detective Michael to look over
Sarah’s file. Thus, while Allie’s grief is intense, it is not
paralyzing like Michael’s: she is taking constructive action to
honor her friend and thus eventually to move on from her
grief.
“We’re police officers,” he said, and I heard the pride in his
voice. “We never stop looking for the missing.”
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
(speaker), Crow/Sarah Blue, Allie Hartley, Derek Bell,
Alexander Sholt, Gerry Bell
Related Themes:
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis
Local police officer Allie Hartley has just told Michael that
she still hopes to find her childhood best friend Sarah Blue,
who disappeared at age 14. When she mentions that local
police chief Derek Bell has told her the case is a lost cause,
Michael says that police officers “never stop looking for the
missing.”
This quotation sheds light on the novel’s complicated
portrayal of law enforcement in Australia. On the one hand,
Allie and Michael don’t stop looking for the missing. At the
novel’s end, they have discovered that Derek Bell and local
rich man Alexander Sholt are serial killers who have been
collaborating for over 20 years to kidnap, abuse, and
murder girls—since they first kidnapped and murdered
Sarah as teenagers. Allie and Michael resolve to find the
victims’ bodies and to bring the full force of the law down on
any accomplices to the crimes (as Sarah’s ghost has
murdered Alexander and Derek already, the murderers
themselves are beyond the reach of police). Thus, both
Allie’s intense love for her friend and Allie and Michael’s
“pride” in their identities as “police officers” does lead to
justice being done.
Yet at the same time, serial killer Derek Bell is also a police
officer himself, who uses his power to hide his crimes. And
Derek Bell’s father Gerry, the previous police chief, seems
to have intentionally botched his investigation into Sarah’s
disappearance because he knew or suspected that his son
Derek had victimized her. The extreme corruption and
villainy of Derek and Gerry Bell, then, shows that while Allie
and Michael may believe in the ideal of police officers who
“never stop looking for the missing,” it is an ideal—while the
reality is often ugly, corrupt, and violent.
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Chapter 10. Beth: The Deaths Quotes “I’m not telling you what happened to ask for help,” she
said.
“I told you what I thought about your dad, didn’t I?”
“Then why are you telling it?”
I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. “Yeah.”
Catching drew her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on
“So we’re friends. Because friends always tell each other the
her knees. “To be heard.”
truth. Even when it hurts.”
I was silent for a moment, thinking about that. Then I said,
“Well, that kind of sounds like asking for help.”
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Isobel Catching (speaker),
Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
Related Characters: Beth Teller, Isobel Catching (speaker),
Related Themes: Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller

Page Number: 94 Related Themes:

Explanation and Analysis Related Symbols:

Beth has teleported to Catching to check on her. When
Catching reassures Beth that she’s safe and thanks her for
the concern, Beth half-asserts that she did it out of
friendship but then, embarrassed, stops. Catching tells Beth
that they are friends and claims that the advice she gave
Beth about Michael’s unhealthy grief proves it, because
“friends always tell each other the truth. Even when it
hurts.” First and foremost, this scene establishes that Beth
and Catching recognize and value their growing friendship,
but it also defines what friendship means in the novel and
illuminates Catching’s perspective on the story she has
been telling Beth and Michael.
Catching defines friendship as a willingness to “hurt[]” your
friends’ feelings in service of helping them see the truth.
This definition contrasts starkly with how Beth has been
treating the grief-stricken Michael: she has been hiding the
truth of her death by not phasing through solid objects or
crying in front of him. By Catching’s definition, Beth is not
being a good friend to Michael when she tries to spare his
feelings—and the rest of the novel proves Catching right, as
Michael begins to move past his paralyzing grief only when
Beth begins to tell him painful truths about how his
behavior has been affecting her.
Catching’s claim that she and Beth are friends because
“friends always tell each other the truth” also illuminates
that Catching believes the fantastical story she has been
telling Beth and Michael is true. Because Beth will
eventually learn that the details of this story are allegorical,
not literal facts, Catching’s assertion that they are
nevertheless true bolsters Michael’s earlier claim that
Catching is trying to tell the truth “in a different way,”
through a story whose essence and message are true, even
while its details are invented.
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis
When Beth urges Catching to let Michael help her, Catching
claims that she isn’t sharing her story with Beth and Michael
“to ask for help.” Their discussion about why Catching is
telling her story sheds light on the novel’s understanding of
storytelling and trauma.
At multiple points, Catching tells Michael that he is “too
late” to help her. Michael interprets this to mean that
Catching thinks she is beyond saving—but eventually, it
becomes clear that Catching believes she has already saved
herself, rendering Michael’s help unnecessary. When
Catching says she wants “to be heard,” then, she seems to
mean that she wants Beth to hear a lesson about resilience
within her story—a lesson that Beth can apply to her own
(after)life. Catching tells the story not to be helped but to
help Beth, a detail that emphasizes the girls’ growing
friendship and the value of stories as a kind of indirect
education in life’s truths.
Yet when Beth says that wanting “to be heard” is like “asking
for help,” she suggests that for a trauma survivor like
Catching, having one’s story heard, understood, and
validated can be a helpful, healing experience. Further, she
suggests that this is true even if, like Catching, one has
already overcome the situation that caused the initial
trauma. Certain visual details in the novel suggest that Beth
is right. As Catching tells her story, she looks more intensely
colorful and more sharply defined. Since intense colors
symbolize positive emotion and psychological health
throughout the novel, Catching’s increasing brightness
hints that telling her story to a friend is helping and healing
her, even as it helps Beth as well.

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Chapter 11. Catching: The Prisoner Quotes
“He eats what’s inside our insides. The colours that live in
our spirits. Do you think I was always a grey girl?”
Related Characters: Crow/Sarah Blue (speaker), Isobel
Catching, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis
Captive in the Feed’s lair, Catching has just encountered the
mysterious, monochromatically gray Crow. Crow is
explaining to Catching what the Feed does to his victims.
Her explanation expands on the symbolism of grayness and
intense colors that appears throughout the novel. If colors
represent “what’s inside our insides” and what “live[s] in our
spirits,” they seem to symbolize an intangible reality: the
psychological, emotional, and spiritual characteristics of the
Feed’s victims that his attacks destroy. Thus, the monstrous
Feed’s devouring of his victim’s colors symbolizes abuse
that traumatizes its victims so badly that they lose
emotional vibrancy, psychological resilience, or spiritual
health.
If intense colors represent positive emotion and
psychological-spiritual health in this symbolic system, then
gray—the absence of intense color—must represent
emotional numbness or deadness and psychological-
spiritual trauma. When Crow asks Catching, “Do you think I
was always a grey girl?”, then, she is explaining that
sustained abuse has traumatized her and limited her
capacity for emotion, but that she used to be happy and
mentally well. This contrast foreshadows the revelation that
Crow is the ghost of serial killers Alexander Sholt and Derek
Bell’s first victim, 14-year-old Sarah Blue—whose very
name, “Blue,” suggests positive emotion and resilience in the
As long as I remember where I come from.
novel’s symbolic system.
Who I come from.
Chapter 13. Catching: The Grey Quotes
“It is your grey. Like mine, but not. Everyone’s grey is their
own.”
Related Characters: Crow/Sarah Blue (speaker), Isobel
Catching, Alexander Sholt
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis
The Feed has just ripped into Catching’s abdomen, pulled
out a color, and eaten it. When Catching is returned to her
room after the assault, she notices that the skin on her arm
where the Feed first touched her has turned gray. She tries
to scratch off the gray, Crow tells her that it’s irremovable:
“It is your grey.” Crow’s statements about Catching’s gray
advance the novel’s symbolic representation of trauma.
The monstrous Feed is Catching’s allegorical
representation of serial killer Alexander Sholt, who holds
girls captive and abuses them before murdering them. In
this context, the scene where the Feed first violently tears
into Catching’s abdomen and steals a color from her likely
symbolizes Alexander sexually assaulting Catching for the
first time, traumatizing her and damaging her “colors,”
symbolic representations of positive emotion and
psychological health. When Crow says that Catching’s gray
is “like mine,” she is acknowledging that Alexander assaulted
and traumatized her in the same way.
Yet when Crow says, “Everyone’s grey is their own,” she is
asserting that people subjected to the same traumas
(kidnapping, captivity, sexual assault) will react in different
ways. Even if Crow and Catching are victims of the same
abuser, they retain their individuality. Thus, the novel avoids
flattening Crow and Catching into interchangeable “victims”
by asserting that they are distinct people whose trauma
belongs to them alone, not to an umbrella identity category
of “victimized girls.”
I can endure.
Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Alexander
Sholt
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 112
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Explanation and Analysis
After the Feed first attacks Catching and eats one of her
colors, she notices a patch of gray on her arm. In the
allegorical system of Catching’s story, this fantastical series
of events represents the first time serial killer Alexander
Sholt assaults her (likely sexually) and traumatizes her,
damaging her psychological health (represented by the
bright color the Feed devours) and emotionally deadening
her (represented by the gray he leaves behind). To “endure”
the trauma, Catching silently recites the names of her
female Aboriginal forebears, paying particular attention to
her grandmother, a member of the “Stolen Generations” of
Aboriginal children who were removed from their families
by the government to forcibly assimilate them into ‘white’
Australian culture.
When Catching remembers her grandmother’s endurance
in a government group facility as an inspiration, she draws a
direct link between historical abuses of Aboriginal children
by the Australian government and privileged white
Alexander Sholt’s sexual abuse of her, a vulnerable
Aboriginal teenager. Thus, the novel implies that historical
racism against Aboriginal people in Australia persists in the
way that white people get away with discriminating against
or even abusing vulnerable Aboriginal people in the present
day. Yet while being Aboriginal has historically meant
suffering discrimination and trauma, Aboriginal Catching
asserts that “remembering where I come from” makes her
strong. This assertion emphasizes that an Aboriginal group
identity can be a source of resilience in the face of historical
and contemporary trauma.
Chapter 14. Beth: The Colours Quotes
Mum had been there my whole life, helping me be a
butterfly girl.
Maybe all hopeful thoughts were just someone who loved us,
reaching out from another side. Which meant I could be there
for my family even after I’d crossed over!
Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Beth’s Dad/
Michael Teller, Aunty June
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis
Beth, haunting the physical world, has spotted an entryway
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to an afterlife of intense colors, through which she hears
her deceased mother singing. The song triggers a
realization that Beth heard her mother’s supportive voice
throughout her life but mistook it for her own voice. When
she says that her mother helped her “be a butterfly girl,” she
is referring to her Aunty June’s nickname for her, “butterfly
girl,” a reference to her joyful, present-oriented worldview.
Beth means that her mother helped her avoid becoming
paralyzed by grief, stuck in the past the way that Beth’s
father Michael is now stuck due to his grief over Beth’s
death. The afterlife full of colors emphasizes the connection
between joy and Beth’s mother’s example, as intense colors
represent positive emotion and psychological health
throughout the novel.
The afterlife’s colorful appearance makes clear that it is a
good place and that it would be an unhealthy choice for
Beth to stay haunting the physical world forever. Moreover,
since Beth is haunting the physical world for her father’s
benefit, this scene makes clear that the haunting is
unnecessary: Beth could provide emotional support to her
father from the afterlife in the same way that her deceased
mother provided emotional support to her in the past. This
quotation makes clear that when a person dies, their
relational ties to their loved ones aren’t severed, just
changed in nature—and that inconsolable grief like
Michael’s fails to take into account the possibility of ongoing
loving relationships between the dead and the living.
Chapter 15. Beth: The Cop Quotes
“You taught me to be fair, Dad, and what you’re doing’s not
fair to anybody. Especially me. How do you think I’m going to
feel if I’m the reason you make everybody miserable? And if you
can’t see how wrong you are—how unfair you’re being, to
yourself and everybody else—then you’re not the dad I know.”
Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Beth’s Dad/
Michael Teller
Related Themes:
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis
Michael, an upstanding police detective, hates injustice and
raised his daughter Beth “to be fair.” Yet he has just admitted
to Beth that he irrationally blames himself for her death, a
random car accident that he could not have predicted or
prevented, and that he has been avoiding his beloved in-
laws because he feels he no longer deserves a relationship
with them. In this quotation, Beth forcefully confronts
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Michael about how unhealthy his grief is for the first time.
Beth’s criticism of Michael is powerful for two reasons.
First, she mobilizes his own values against him: knowing
that he loves justice and fairness, she tells him that “what
he’s doing’s not fair to anybody,” either himself, his daughter,
or his in-laws. Second, she makes clear that his unhealthy,
obsessive grief isn’t only hurting him: it’s making his living
loved ones “miserable” and making Beth feel guilty for being
the “reason” for this spreading emotional hurt. Prior to this
point, Beth has largely avoided confronting her father about
his unhealthy grief and tried to make him feel better by
hiding her true opinions and feelings from him; as such, her
direct, accurate criticism of him here constitutes a major
development for her character.
Chapter 16. Beth: The Story Quotes
I couldn’t bear to say that the colours weren’t real.
Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Isobel Catching,
Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis
Beth has just admitted to her father Michael that Catching
can see ghosts and that she believes Beth should move on
to the afterlife rather than continuing to haunt Michael in
the physical world. When a surprised Michael asks whether
Beth can move on, Beth wants to lie to him—but she knows
an afterlife full of beautiful colors exists and can’t “bear to
say that the colours [aren’t] real.” Throughout the novel,
intense colors symbolize positive emotion and psychological
health, while their opposite—gray—represents emotional
numbness and psychological damage due to grief or trauma.
Given this symbolism, the fact that the afterlife appears
intensely colorful to Beth makes clear that it would be
emotionally beneficial and psychologically healthy for Beth
to move on. As long as she remains in the physical world
haunting her father, she is prevented from experiencing
much positive growth or change, remaining frozen at the
moment of her death. When Beth can’t “bear to say that the
colours [aren’t] real,” then, it shows that she recognizes an
emotionally positive, psychologically intense future is open
to her: she doesn’t have to remain in a “gray,” stunted state
forever. It also shows that she is no longer willing or able to
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deceive her grieving father about what she is giving up to
stay with him. As such, Beth’s refusal to lie about the
afterlife’s beautiful colors in this moment constitutes
another important step in her character’s development.
Chapter 17. Catching: The Two Quotes
People can time travel inside their heads.
Remember into the past.
Imagine into the future.
But sometimes you can’t escape the now.
Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Beth Teller,
Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller, Alexander Sholt, Director Tom
Cavanagh/First Fetcher, Nurse Martin Flint/Second
Fetcher, Aunty June
Related Themes:
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis
Catching contemplates the nature of time as the Fetchers,
First and Second, carry her paralyzed body through the
tunnels to be fed upon by the Feed. Her contemplation
acknowledges the power of subjective time over objective
time. While objective time always and only moves forward
at a steady pace, people don’t have to abide by objective
time “inside their heads.” Instead, they can go “into the past”
and “into the future” through their memories and
imaginations. This ability can have a positive effect, as when
Beth’s Aunty June tells loving stories about her memories of
Beth to comfort Beth’s grieving cousins—or a negative
effect, as when Beth’s father Michael obsessively fixates on
the day of Beth’s death.
Yet Catching also acknowledges the limits of a person’s
ability to control their subjective experience of time. While
she can visit the past and future in her mind, “sometimes
you can’t escape the now.” Given the context—Catching is
being carried toward yet another traumatic assault by the
Feed, her allegorical representation of abuser and serial
killer Alexander Sholt—Catching likely means that some
experiences are simply too horrible to be deflected with
memory and imagination. Thus, the novel makes clear how
powerful things like imagination and memory can be, while
also emphasizing that a person’s memory and imagination
can’t always allow someone to avoid traumas in the present
moment.
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If I’m dead inside, I’m free.
No.
If I’m dead inside I’m dead inside.
Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Crow/
Sarah Blue, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis
On several occasions during Catching’s captivity, Crow
advised Catching to become “dead inside” to avoid pain
while the monstrous Feed eats her colors. The Feed eating
its victims’ colors allegorically represents serial killers
Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell repeatedly assaulting the
girls they hold captive before murdering them; thus, Crow is
advising Catching to dissociate from being physically and
psychologically traumatized, to become emotionally “gray”
and numb, as a way to escape suffering. After many assaults,
Catching begins to wonder whether Crow is right: “If I’m
dead inside, I’m free.” Yet Catching ultimately rejects Crow’s
advice, because “if I’m dead inside I’m dead inside.” This
rejection suggests that while being “dead inside” may “free”
Catching from suffering, such freedom isn’t worth the loss
of her emotional life.
Catching’s belief that it is worth suffering to stay
emotionally alive eventually inspires Crow. Crow, the ghost
of Alexander and Derek’s first victim, has emotionally
numbed herself not only due to the trauma of her own
murder but also due to the trauma of watching subsequent
girls be held captive, assaulted, and murdered in
Alexander’s secret bunker, which Crow haunts. When
Catching convinces Crow to embrace her own emotions
again, Crow becomes more than a passive spectator to
other girls’ suffering: she resolves to help Catching escape.
Thus, in the novel, protecting one’s emotional
vibrancy—even if that entails suffering—turns out to be vital
to survival.
Chapter 18. Catching: The Dream Quotes
“If you can name it, you can catch it,” she calls. “If you can
catch it, you can fight it. Everything has its opposite. Remember!”
Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Beth Teller,
Crow/Sarah Blue, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis
Near to death, Catching has a dream about Alexander Sholt
and Derek Bell’s previous victims. In the dream, one of the
victims advises Catching to “name,” “catch,” and “fight” a
mysterious “it” with “its opposite.” This advice is important
both because it ultimately nuances the novel’s color
symbolism and because it emphasizes the importance of
female friendship to girls’ survival.
After waking from the dream, Catching realizes that the
victim in her dream was telling her to “name” the pieces of
gray coloring her body in the aftermath of the two Feeds
devouring her colors. In Catching’s story, the Feeds’
devouring her colors allegorically represents Alexander and
Derek assaulting her during her captivity, stealing her
positive emotions (symbolized by intense colors) and
replacing them with trauma (symbolized by gray). Thus, the
victim in the dream is telling Catching to “name” her
emotional responses to trauma to “catch” or neutralize them
before healing them with their “opposite,” which is positive
emotion. When Catching and Crow take this advice, they
regain enough strength and resilience to escape the bunker
where Alexander holds his victims.
While Catching can see ghosts, it isn’t clear whether the
victim in her dream is really one of the dead girls that
Alexander killed or a representation of Catching’s own
subconscious. Regardless, that life-saving advice comes to
Catching from a real or imagined manifestation of another
victimized girl shows the importance of female friendship to
the novel. Throughout the novel, pairs of grieving or
traumatized girls befriend and help each other—Catching
and the unnamed dream victim, Catching and Crow,
Catching and Beth—with the ultimate effect of saving
Catching’s life, ending Alexander and Derek’s reign of
terror, and helping Beth reach the afterlife. Thus, the novel
insists that female friendship is a powerful force for survival
and growth in girls’ lives.
Chapter 19. Catching: The Catching Quotes
No ticking clocks.
Just choices.
They measure the distance between who we are and who we’re
turning into.
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Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Crow/
Sarah Blue, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt
Related Themes:
Related Symbols:
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis
In preparation for fighting the monstrous Feeds that have
been eating their colors, their victims Catching and Crow
work to remove the “gray” that the Feeds’ assaults have
inflicted on them and regain their stolen colors.
Allegorically, this process represents Catching and Crow
confronting and healing from the trauma of the assaults
inflicted on them by serial killers Alexander Sholt and Derek
Bell (the Feeds). The girls work doggedly to regain their
colors without having any idea how long the process takes.
The girls’ indifference to objective, linear time, represented
by “ticking clocks,” makes sense on a literal level: Alexander
and Derek hold their victims in an underground bunker
without access to clocks, so the girls couldn’t tell time even
if they wanted to. On a figurative level, however, Catching’s
preference for “choices” over “clocks” as a way of measuring
progress insists that personal growth and healing from
trauma do not occur passively. Time doesn’t heal all wounds
simply by continuing to “tick[]”; instead, “turning into” the
person you want to be and healing from trauma involves a
conscious effort and may not progress steadily or linearly
like seconds on a clock. Thus, this quotation asserts the
importance of subjective experiences of time and of
effortful personal growth over objective clock time and
passive healing.
Catching and Crow are escaping from the bunker where
serial killers Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell—whom
Catching allegorically perceives as monsters called
Feeds—have trapped them. Catching has described the
repeated assaults Alexander and Derek inflicted on her as
the monstrous Feeds devouring her colors, leaving her
gray—a symbolic representation of how repeated traumas
have stolen her positive emotions and psychological health.
During the escape, Catching confronts the Feed that
represents Alexander Sholt and tells him that the gray on
her body belong to him, not her.
Previously, Crow told Catching that her gray belonged to
her and wasn’t identical to anyone else’s gray, including
Crow’s. This statement was true insofar as it meant that
people who experience the same traumas don’t necessarily
respond in the same way; Crow and Catching are two
distinct girls who suffer differently and heal differently,
even though the same two men abuse them both. In that
context, Crow was asserting her and Catching’s emotional
and psychological uniqueness when she claimed they each
possessed their own gray.
When Catching tells Alexander Sholt that the gray on her
body belongs to him, on the other hand, she is asserting that
he bears moral responsibility for abusing and traumatizing
her. He deserves to feel the negative emotions like “shame”
that she suffered due to his assaults, while she deserves to
feel “pride” for her resilience and the other positive
emotions (symbolized by intense colors) that she has
managed to claw back despite his abuse. Thus, while
Catching “owns” her gray inasmuch as her trauma response
and healing process are unique to her, Alexander “owns” it
inasmuch as it is his fault—and here, Catching powerfully
places the blame on him, where it deserves to be placed.

Chapter 21. Beth: The End Quotes

Chapter 20. Catching: The Escape Quotes
“Of course you’re here at the end. So what? It’s the
“This gray’s yours,” I say. “My colours are mine. I’m not
beginning that hasn’t happened yet.”
carrying your shame for what you did. Only my pride. For
surviving you.”
Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Beth Teller,
Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller
Related Characters: Isobel Catching (speaker), Crow/
Sarah Blue, Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt Related Themes:
Related Themes: Page Number: 182

Related Symbols: Explanation and Analysis

Michael has finally decoded Catching’s allegorical story
Page Number: 162 about the abuse she suffered at the hands of serial killers
Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell, who for more than two
Explanation and Analysis

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decades have been holding girls captive, assaulting them,
and murdering them. Michael is lamenting to Beth that they
arrived “at the end” of the story, not early enough to help
any of Alexander and Derek’s victims—when Catching
abruptly appears to tell them that while the end has already
occurred, “the beginning […] hasn’t happened yet.”
Catching’s statement rejects the primacy both of objective
time and of linear storytelling. Whereas objective time
always and only moves forward, the subjective time in which
personal growth occurs can move backward or forward, in
memory and imagination, in backsliding and progress,
without regard for the clock. Whereas linear stories begin
at a single beginning and end at a single end, nonlinear,
cyclical stories can have multiple endings and
beginnings—one ending doesn’t mean a permanent end.
By implication, Catching is claiming that the horrible crimes
Alexander and Derek committed against her don’t have to
mean “the end” for her; she and other victims of assault and
trauma can have a new “beginning” after their abuse ends.
Thus, Catching is saying that trauma and healing occur
according to personal, subjective time, not clock-time, and
that trauma is not only an “end” but the potential for a
“beginning” after healing. Thus she asserts hope about
healing and growth in the aftermath of trauma, grief, and
other painful experiences.
Chapter 22. Beth: The Beginning Quotes
And wherever we went, we went together.
Related Characters: Beth Teller (speaker), Isobel Catching,
Crow/Sarah Blue, Beth’s Dad/Michael Teller, Allie Hartley,
Derek Bell, Alexander Sholt, Aunty Viv
©2023 LitCharts LLC v.007 www.LitCharts.com
Related Themes:
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis
Beth and Crow, who are ghosts, and Catching, who has the
supernatural power to travel between realities, have
decided to travel to the afterlife together to visit their loved
ones. This line, which ends the novel, asserts that the three
girls travel everywhere “together.” As a conclusion, it
emphasizes the importance both of female friendships and
of relationships to healing from grief and trauma.
The culmination of Beth’s character development may seem
like a celebration of individualism, not relationships. After
all, Beth has finally chosen to stop haunting her grief-
stricken father and move on to a happy life, which readers
could interpret as a celebration of Beth’s individual
independence and a repudiation of Michael’s unhealthy
emotional dependence on her ghost. Yet the actual details
of Beth’s moving on undercuts the individualistic reading.
After all, Beth doesn’t go to the afterlife alone: she travels
there with two new female friends who have been
encouraging her to stop haunting the physical world for her
own good—and all three girls are primarily interested in the
afterlife because it contains their deceased loved ones.
Moreover, Michael doesn’t mark his healing from grief with
rugged independence; instead, he calls his in-law Aunty Viv
for the first time since Beth died and attends a family
birthday party. He also has plans to collaborate with his new
friend Allie Hartley to bring serial killers Alexander Sholt
and Derek Bell’s accomplices to justice. Thus, being
“together” with others is a sign of healing from grief or
trauma for all the novel’s major characters.
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SUMMARY AND ANAL
ANALYSIS
YSIS
The color-coded icons under each analysis entry make it easy to track where the themes occur most prominently throughout the
work. Each icon corresponds to one of the themes explained in the Themes section of this LitChart.
CHAPTER 1. BETH: THE TOWN
Beth’s dad looks awful, “a pale shell.” Though Beth no longer
appears in reflective surfaces, her dad says she looks the same:
blue-eyed like him, black-haired and brown-skinned like her
mom. Beth and her dad walk up a hill. Dust covers Beth’s dad
but not Beth’s yellow dress, identical to the day she got in the
car with Aunty Viv. The hill looks over a town; when Beth points
out that her dad won’t solve the crime up here, he says he
misses her. Beth reassures him, but she knows her current
state—a ghost since another car rammed Aunty Viv’s—isn’t
what he wants.
Beth has all physical sensations except touch. She didn’t guess
death would be like this: she’d expected her mother, who died
when she was an infant, to greet her on “another side,” the way
her mother’s sisters, Aunty Viv and Aunty June, always
suggested. Beth predicts she’ll reunite with her mother in the
future, but right now she’s marking progress not by time but by
whether her actions help her dad: “As my Grandpa Jim had
once said to me, Life doesn’t move through time, Bethie. Time
moves through life.”
Beth urges her dad to start investigating the town. He says
that’s what he’s doing—trying to grasp what the place is like. It
reminds him of his and Beth’s mom’s hometown, a place where
police officers have outsized influence. Beth infers that her dad
is dwelling on bad memories of his own father, a local police
officer who used the law to persecute Aboriginal people and
disowned Beth’s dad when he started dating Beth’s mom, an
Aboriginal woman.
When Beth asks whether the police here will be like her
grandfather, her dad says he isn’t sure—things have been
getting better, incrementally—but the case may not be worth
his time. This troubles Beth, who wants her dad to focus on
work so grief doesn’t overwhelm him. She reminds him that an
unidentified corpse was found in the “children’s home” that
burned down, though the children survived.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
By comparing her dad to a “pale shell” of his former self, Beth
suggests that his grief at her accidental death has faded and
hollowed out his once-strong personality. Unlike her dad, Beth looks
the same as before she died, right down to the yellow dress she was
wearing. Yellow seems like a happy color, suggesting that Beth was a
joyous girl—but Beth’s inability to change the clothes she died in
suggests that death has artificially frozen her personal growth.
Beth has good reason to travel to “another side,” an afterlife beyond
the physical world: she suspects her mother might be there. On the
other hand, she has good reason to haunt the physical world: she
wants to aid her grief-stricken father. Beth’s grandfather’s saying
about time and life suggests that the “right time” for Beth to move
on wasn’t necessarily immediately upon her death—but that
perhaps when or if her circumstances change, it may become
appropriate for her to leave her father behind.
The novel has not yet revealed what crime Beth’s dad is trying to
solve, but his memories of his bigoted police-officer father may
foreshadow that prejudiced police officers or racism against
Australian Aboriginal people will be relevant to the case going
forward.
Though Beth is the one who died, she is focused on taking care of
her miserable father rather than figuring out her own predicament.
This dubious role-reversal—in which the adolescent child takes care
of the parent—suggests that grief has rendered Beth and her dad’s
relationship psychologically unhealthy.
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Beth tells her dad he should wait until the corpse has been
identified to decide about the case. Her dad retorts that it was
probably either the director of the home or the nurse, the only
two adults who lived there—more likely the nurse, because the
nurse and the corpse are both tall. When Beth asks what
happened to the director and questions whether the fire was
accidental, her dad claims the case is negligible: he’s only there
due to Oversight, a program requiring seasoned detectives to
review all potential homicides. Privately, Beth thinks that her
father is there because his boss Rachel knows he’s grieving and
wanted to give him an easy job. She thinks hard work would be
better for her dad, though.
Beth’s dad’s phone rings, but he ignores it. Beth guesses it’s one
of her mom’s siblings; they want her dad to reconcile with
Aunty Viv. Beth reminds her dad that she died because another
driver skidded during a rainstorm, not because of anything
Aunty Viv did, and tells him he’s being unjust. Though her dad
ignores her, she suspects he knows she’s right.
Beth remembers when Aunty Viv came to her dad’s house,
knocked hard on the door, and yelled that she wished she were
dead instead of Beth. Her appearance shocked Beth: Aunty Viv,
who loved bright clothes and nail polish, was wearing an “old
grey tracksuit” and unpainted nails. Though only Beth’s dad can
perceive Beth’s ghost, Beth tried to talk to Aunty Viv, telling her
that Beth didn’t wish she had died and that her children needed
her. After a while, Aunty Viv’s despairing tears—so reminiscent
of Beth’s dad’s—panicked Beth, and she shouted that she
couldn’t be “the reason anyone else falls apart!”
Unexpectedly, Aunty Viv stopped crying and looked down at
her tracksuit in surprise. She stood, called to Beth’s dad that if
he wanted her, she’d be there, and walked away more
confidently than she’d arrived. Beth believes that Aunty Viv’s
“spirit” heard Beth yelling, even if Aunty Viv didn’t literally hear
her. The next time Beth saw her, she was wearing “her favorite
pink dress,” which reassured Beth.
Beth wants her family to be all right, including her dad—and she
wants him to reconcile with Aunty Viv. When she reminds her
dad that her mom’s family lost her too—“more” than he did,
because they can’t see her—her dad snaps that no one lost her
“more” than he did and stomps away. Beth recognizes that he’s
right: whereas her mom’s family remembers her joyfully, her
dad is so focused on her death that it’s like he’s lost all his happy
memories of her. Though annoyed at her dad’s attitude, Beth is
at least glad she made him so angry that he’s not sad.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Beth’s dad’s boss is trying to give him easy assignments, which
suggests that his grief appears obvious and potentially debilitating
to outside observers. This is another sign that his grieving process
isn’t going well, despite the help he’s getting from Beth, the very
person he’s grieving. It remains to be seen whether Rachel is right
that he could use an easy job—or if Beth is right that hard work will
help him.
Beth’s dad seems incapable of moving past irrational anger at Aunty
Viv for a tragedy that, as Beth and others make clear here, wasn’t
her fault—another sign that his grief over Beth’s death is
psychologically unhealthy.
Aunty Viv’s name may remind readers of “vivacious” and “vivid,”
words suggesting liveliness and brightness. The “old grey tracksuit”
she wears after Beth dies represents how grief has dulled and
warped her vivacious personality, which was symbolized by the
bright clothes she loves. Beth panics at Aunty Viv’s claim that she
wishes she had died instead of Beth, which underscores that both
Aunty Viv’s and Beth’s dad’s reactions to Beth’s death—“fall[ing]
apart—are unhealthy and frightening.
The “old grey tracksuit” that Aunty Viv wears when passively
suicidal with grief contrasts with the “pink dress” she wears after her
“spirit” responds to Beth’s pleas not to “fall[] apart.” These two
outfits set up a symbolic system in which gray represents unhealthy
grief or trauma, while intense colors like pink represent
psychological or emotional health and strength.
Beth’s dad lost her “more” than her other relatives because his
memories of her are frozen, fixated on her death. By contrast, her
other relatives have a fuller sense of what Beth’s life was, the happy
parts as well as the sad. That Beth’s dad is fixated on her death,
despite being able to interact with her ghost, suggests that Beth’s
decision to haunt him (if it was indeed her choice to do so) until he
heals from his grief may have backfired: her ghostly presence may
be preventing him from moving on, rather than helping him.
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CHAPTER 2. BETH: THE HOME
Beth and her dad visit the ruins of the children’s home, well
outside of town. When Beth sees a crow perching on the ruins,
she waves—and the crow flies away. She wonders whether her
wave caused the crow to leave: one of her science teachers
once told her that “correlation does not imply causation,” but
her dad says that if two events happen one after another,
detectives assume that the first event caused the second
unless someone proves otherwise.
Beth’s dad isn’t angry anymore. In fact, Beth knows he was
angry about her death before, not angry at her. When Beth
thinks about the random injustice of her death, she gets angry
too—but she avoids thinking about that in favor of taking care
of her dad. Seeing that he’s “frustrated” by the crime scene, she
asks why the home was built so far from town. He explains that
the home used to be a rich family’s private house.
Beth’s dad shows her a photo of the house taken a couple
weeks before the fire. In the photo, 10 or so children are
smiling unconvincingly in front of the house, while three adults
stand nearby. Beth asks whether one man in the photo—skinny
and pallid with glasses—was the children’s home’s nurse. Beth’s
dad says that the man is Alexander Sholt, who donated the
house and a lot of money for the children’s home.
Beth’s dad points out the nurse, a tall man with unkempt hair,
and the home’s director, a short man with a beard. When Beth
asks what their jobs entailed, her dad explains that the nurse
handled the children’s health, while the director gave the
children classes and handled the home’s operations. He says
the men were trying to improve the children’s lives; noting his
melancholy, Beth thinks that her dad can’t help the person who
died anymore, but he can find out the truth about his death.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Here Beth contrasts scientists’ and detectives’ storytelling, two very
different modes of processing information about the world. In
scientific storytelling, “correlation does not imply causation:” just
because Beth waved and then the crow flew away, the storyteller
can’t assume that Beth’s wave caused the crow to fly away. By
contrast, detectives do tend to assume causal relationships
between events that occur in sequence: if Beth waved and then the
crow flew away, the crow probably flew away because Beth waved.
Beth’s focus on different modes of processing information here
suggests that storytelling will be important to the novel. Her focus
on the crow also foreshadows the bird’s possible importance.
Injustice makes Beth’s dad angry—which suggests that he became a
detective to serve justice, perhaps even to make up for his own
police officer father’s unjust treatment of Aboriginal people.
Meanwhile, Beth is repressing her own anger about her death on her
father’s behalf, hinting that her decision to haunt him may be
psychologically unhealthy for her as well as for him.
Government workers presumably placed the children in the home
because the children’s parents either died or were accused of abuse
or neglect. As such, the children may have personal reasons to be
unhappy. Yet their faked smiles may hint that the home itself is
unpleasant in ways that they, as powerless wards of the state, can’t
do anything about.
The thought that the director and nurse died while trying to help
children saddens Beth’s dad, emphasizing that he likely entered law
enforcement to pursue justice and help people. Beth seems to
believe that even in situations where he can’t help people, finding
the truth—figuring out the home’s story, as it were—may improve his
mood. This suggests that the truth is a good thing in itself, even
when it can’t tangibly help people anymore.
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Beth and Beth’s dad review the facts of the case. The fire
started at approximately 10 p.m. one night. The children
claimed they left the house before the fire alarm sounded
because “the wind” warned them to flee, but Beth’s dad
suspects they’re lying: they might have been up past curfew
and seen the fire before the alarm. When Beth asks whether
they might have something to conceal, Beth’s dad says that
troubled children often avoid “speaking to people in authority
about anything” regardless. He notes that the children were
from the city and wonders whether it was a good idea to send
them far away from their families.
Beth asks why the nurse didn’t flee. Her dad speculates that
the nurse might have died or been knocked out before the
alarm. Beth suggests the director did it—but her dad says it’s
more likely that the fire caused both the nurse’s death and the
director’s disappearance. Maybe the director ran out into the
wilderness and got lost. Beth asks why the search teams
haven’t found him, then, the way they found “that girl who was
wandering around” the area. She suggests they go interview
the girl.
Beth’s dad implies that the girl is an unreliable witness but
won’t say why. Beth impatiently reveals that she knows the girl
had drugs in her system and makes a joke about not having
done “many” drugs herself. Beth and her dad laugh—until he
stops abruptly. Beth, sure he’s going to say he misses her again,
wishes he could grieve more like Aunty June, who tells funny
stories about Beth to Beth’s cousins and encourages them to
grieve with laughter as well as tears. Beth, marching to the car,
tells her dad to come interview the witness.
CHAPTER 3. BETH: THE WITNESS
Beth and her dad go to the local hospital to visit the witness,
who is being monitored there as the drugs leave her system.
Beth only recalls visiting one other hospital, where a rude
doctor asked whether “quite so many family members” needed
to be visiting her Uncle Mick. In this hospital’s waiting area,
locals gossip about the fire and the death, but none of them
seem to have known the nurse or director well.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Beth’s dad dismisses the idea that “the wind” could have warned the
children, showing that he is resistant to believing fantastical
stories—even though he can see his daughter’s ghost. His worry that
the children were sent too far away from their families suggest that
government programs can sometimes hurt the people they are
supposed to help, and his nonjudgmental description of troubled
children who won’t “speak[] to people in authority” implies that
children sometimes have good reason not to want to interact with
police officers.
Beth and her dad spin different stories that fit the available facts
about the case as a way of trying to figure out what really happened.
This activity shows how telling stories can be a method of
discovering the truth, not just a way of recounting a truth a person
already knows or a way of inventing falsehoods.
Beth contrasts her dad’s unrelenting misery at her death with her
Aunty June’s attempts to remember Beth happily. Beth’s obvious
preference for Aunty June’s more balanced style of grieving implies
that her father’s misery makes Beth feel trapped in misery too. On
the other hand, Beth and her dad’s laughter over her joke about not
doing too “many” drugs shows readers what their relationship might
have been like before grief overshadowed it.
The sole previous time Beth has visited a hospital, the doctor was
rude to her Aboriginal family, implying that her uncle had too “many
family members.” This subtly racist incident illustrates the persistent
prejudice against Aboriginal people in contemporary Australia.
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Beth’s dad identifies himself as a detective to a harried female
nurse and asks to go interview the witness. She is offering to
take him to the witness’s room when the wind slams open the
waiting-room door—at which point she tells him to go on alone.
Beth and Beth’s dad walk down a hall into a room full of
hospital beds, mostly occupied by middle-aged people. Beth is
pointing out a girl she thinks is the witness when a different girl
(later revealed to be Catching)—pale with “sharp” features,
dark-haired, and wearing a long sweater over her hospital
gown—appears and asks whether Beth’s dad is a policeman.
Beth’s dad says he’s a detective and asks whether the girl
(Catching) is the witness to the fire. When she says yes, he asks
whether he can interview her, and—rather standoffishly—she
agrees. They go into a private hospital room. Beth’s dad
introduces himself as Michael and asks the girl’s name. When
she snarks that a detective should already know, Beth
comments that the girl may not remember that she was too
disoriented to give her name when the rescue team found her.
The girl then introduces herself as Isobel Catching and tells
Michael to call her Catching.
When Michael comments that Catching is an “unusual” name,
Catching explains that the white employer of her great-great-
grandmother named her that because she had a talent for
recapturing stray cattle—and she couldn’t refuse the name.
When Michael asks whether Catching is Aboriginal, Catching
sneeringly asks whether he thinks she isn’t “brown enough,” as
if everyone of Aboriginal descent has the same skin color.
Michael says no and mentions that his wife was Aboriginal.
Catching, still sneeringly, suggests that she and Michael will be
“best friends” because of that.
Though Catching’s tone annoys Beth, it doesn’t offend Michael.
He just asks her whether she saw anything the night of the fire.
She says that “depends.” When he asks what it depends on, she
seems to glance at Beth before saying, “On if you’ll believe me.”
Michael says he’ll hear whatever she has to say, but she warns
him that her story contains “monsters and other-places.” Beth
thinks Catching is playing a joke on him, but then she realizes
that tough-girl Catching is afraid. Michael assures Catching
that he can believe what she has to tell him. When she tells him
it’s a long story that began before the fire, he turns off his
phone and asks her to begin at the beginning. She says the
events began “with a sunset.”
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Beth’s dad previously mentioned that the children in the home
claimed the “wind” warned them about the fire. Now an abrupt
wind distracts the nurse, allowing Beth’s dad to go meet the witness
alone. While the wind in this scene may be coincidental, unrelated
to the mysterious wind on the night of the fire, the novel may be
hinting that Beth’s dad is wrong to dismiss the children’s fantastical
story as untrue.
Catching’s standoffish and sarcastic comments to the police
detective trying to interview her implies she may distrust or dislike
law enforcement. Beth’s speculation that Catching has forgotten
the circumstances under which the rescue team found her may be
true—or it may hint that Beth and her dad don’t know everything
about the circumstances under which Catching came to the
hospital.
White British colonists came to Australia in the late 1700s. From
about 1816 onward, their colonies expanded dramatically. Their
livestock-farming practices interfered with and displaced Australian
Aboriginal communities. Catching’s story reveals that her great-
great-grandmother was one of the Aboriginal people exploited by
white colonial farmers—a context that partially motivates her
hostile and sarcastic reactions to white law enforcement
professional Michael.
Michael’s lack of annoyance at Catching implies that he
understands why an Aboriginal teenage girl might reasonably
distrust a white police officer. Given Michael’s resistance to
believing the children at the home about the wind warning them, it
seems unlikely that he will “believe” Catching’s story about
“monsters and other-places”—but he asks her to tell it anyway,
suggesting that he may see informational value in stories that aren’t
literally true. Meanwhile, Catching’s apparent glance at Beth
hints—but doesn’t confirm—that Catching can see Beth too.
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CHAPTER 4. CATCHING: THE SUNSET
Catching stands on a “rocky hill” with her mom, whose hair is
dyed “redder” than the sunset. When her mom asks how
Catching is, Catching says she’s cold—the long sweater that her
mother knitted for her isn’t well-made. Catching’s mom gives
her a jacket and asks whether she’s feeling more at peace.
Catching is: she prefers this place to home, where people have
been unjust to her and made her furious. On their trip,
Catching’s mom has taught her to silently recite her female
ancestors’ names, from her great-great-grandmother to
herself, as a way of controlling her anger. Catching has also
learned the stories of her female ancestors’ strengths and
tribulations. Her mom tells Catching that she has inherited “all
the strengths of the Catching women.”
Catching and her mom hear thunder. They rush down to their
car, parked on level ground where it’s likely to flood. By the
time they’ve driven back to the road, it’s raining so hard they
can’t see. Overflow from a nearby river strikes the car, banging
Catching’s head against a window. When she regains
consciousness, a branch has broken through one of the car’s
windows and her mom is trying desperately to unlatch
Catching’s seat belt. Water floods into the car over Catching’s
head.
The seat belt unlatches. Water carries Catching away. She’s
convinced she’ll drown until she recalls her mom saying that
she inherited her female ancestors’ strengths. She knows
there’s something about her “Nanna Sadie” she needs to recall.
As water slips into her mouth, she remembers her mom telling
her that the government seized Sadie as a child, due to a law
that allowed Aboriginal children to be taken from their families.
Officials put Sadie on a boat to “a bad place,” not realizing that
Sadie, born during a storm, could control water. Sadie leapt
from the ship and swam “like a fish” all the way back to her
family.
Catching swims “like a fish,” in the manner of her Nanna Sadie,
to the water’s surface. She can breathe again. As the current
carries her along, she grabs onto a tree root and uses it to climb
ashore, where she sees her mom sprawled on the ground. At
first she yells at her mom to wake up, but then she checks her
mom’s pulse and realizes she’s dead.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
At the novel’s beginning, Beth and Michael were walking up a hill
dotted with rocks; it is possible this remembered scene takes place
on the same “rocky hill” overlooking town. In the novel, intense
colors symbolize positive emotions. Catching’s mom’s brightly dyed
hair thus marks her as an emotionally supportive presence, even
before the novel reveals that she has been teaching Catching helpful
techniques to manage her anger. Catching’s mom’s statement that
Catching has inherited “all the strengths of the Catching women”
asserts that an Aboriginal identity can be a source of resilience and
power despite the suffering that racism has caused Aboriginal
people.
Michael originally asked to interview Catching because she
witnessed the fire at the children’s home—but she is choosing to
start her story with a dangerous flash flood instead: water, not fire.
This unexpected storytelling decision suggests that Michael doesn’t
understand at all how many events lead up to the eventual fire.
From the 1860s until the 1970s, the Australian government
enacted a series of laws and policies that allowed government
officials to forcibly remove children from Aboriginal families and
place them in institutions or with white foster families—with the
goal of assimilating the children into white Australian culture. These
children are sometimes called the “Stolen Generations.” Catching
recalls the resilience of her “Stolen Generations” great-grandmother
to survive the flood; by setting up this parallel between Catching
and her Nanna Sadie, the novel may be implying that Catching will
have to survive an abuse of power like the one Sadie escaped.
The major incident hanging over Beth and Michael’s lives is Beth’s
death, the death of a child. In Catching’s story, the first major
incident is the death of her mom. This connection suggests that grief
and trauma may have impacted all three characters in similar ways.
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CHAPTER 5. CATCHING: THE OTHER-PLACE
Catching cries beside the body, demanding her mom’s return,
until she falls asleep. When she wakes, the sky has two suns,
the trees have lost their leaves, everything is gray, and her
mom’s body has vanished. Catching wonders whether the body
moved or if she did. When her head begins hurting, she touches
her hair and finds blood. Catching is too grief-stricken to be
scared. She recalls that as her mom unclipped the seatbelt, she
ordered Catching to “live.”
Catching, feeling another surge of grief, wonders whether she’ll
“fade away . . . Like the colours in this place.” Yet she recalls her
mom’s command and resolves to live even if she doesn’t want
to. She drinks from a nearby stream, sharpens a nearby branch
into a spear, and starts trying to stab fish in the stream. Then a
pack of fanged, muscular beasts that “shimmer” appear far off.
When they start running for her, she sprints into the trees—all
the way to a “cliff wall.”
Cornered, Catching drops her spear and climbs the cliff. She
has almost reached the top when she runs out of handholds.
She decides to rest on a nearby ledge but has to make a
dangerous jump to reach it. As she jumps, she realizes that
she’s hearing her own voice telling her to live as well as her
mom’s. Catching breaks her hand grabbing the ledge but
reaches it. As she rests, she hears voices overhead. When she
calls out to them, one voice says, “It speaks”—and discusses
with a second voice about how girls always speak, “scream,” and
“cry.”
Two gray, robed creatures with “leathery” wings fly down from
the clifftop to Catching’s ledge. They wear humanoid masks,
but Catching is sure they aren’t human. There’s a “wrongness”
about them that makes her wish she had a weapon. When she
asks what they are, they tell her they are “Fetchers” and
identify themselves as First and Second. Catching concludes
that First is in charge.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Catching seems to describe a fantastical transformation of the
world. Yet previously in the novel, gray has represented the
deadening power of grief, which implies that the grayness she
perceives may be symbolic of her grief at her mother’s death—and
thus that other fantastical details in her story may be symbolic as
well. That Catching’s mom ordered her to “live” emphasizes that
Catching’s mom was a positive force in Catching’s life, imbuing her
with emotional and psychological resilience.
When Catching wonders whether grief will cause her to fade away
“like the colours in this place,” it makes even more explicit that the
other world’s grayness symbolizes emotional pain and deadness.
Meanwhile, the strange beasts that “shimmer” emphasize that
Catching’s story is fantastical—and may cause readers to wonder
whether Michael will believe her.
When Catching hears her own voice telling her to live, it represents
that grief has not made Catching passively suicidal: she is trying to
survive for her own sake, not only because her mother told her to.
The eerie voices discussing how girls always “scream” and “cry,”
meanwhile, hints that this other world may contain predators or
abusers.
The Fetchers’ “leathery” wings suggest that the creatures are batlike,
while their human masks suggest that they are concealing
something inhuman underneath. Catching’s attentiveness to which
Fetcher is in charge hints that questions of power will be important
to her interactions with them.
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First and Second discuss Catching’s colors, “like a rainbow.”
When Second asks whether there’s anyone with her, she says
she’s there with her mom, father (who in fact left the family for
a different female partner a long time ago), and several others.
First laughs, calls her a liar, and says he and Second will “fetch”
her. Suddenly, Second comments unhappily that she’s
wounded. When First says they can heal her, Second asks,
“Only to be broken?” First claims that it isn’t their concern: they
just need to fetch her, fix her, and bring her “to him.” The
Fetchers jump on Catching and, despite her struggles,
apprehend her.
CHAPTER 6. CATCHING: THE BENEATH
The Fetchers fly, carrying Catching, over the trees. They dive
toward the dirt between a tree and a rock that looks like “an
egg tipped on its side”—and plunge into a tunnel. First tells
Second to heal Catching while First informs “him” that they
have fetched a girl. Catching infers that First outranks Second,
but there’s a “real boss” who outranks First.
Second pulls Catching into a room full of shelves holding cubes
filled with what looks like “jelly.” Catching, unable to locate a
weapon or an exit, decides to pump Second for information.
She asks where they are. When he says that it’s “where we
bring the colours,” she offers to give him colors in exchange for
help in escaping. Second explains that Fetchers don’t take
colors; they only fetch colors for “the one who takes the
colours.” Catching decides there’s no point talking to Second.
A jelly blob drops from the air. Second declares that it’s
medicine; when he puts it on Catching’s broken hand, her skin
absorbs it. Her hand burns painfully and then heals. Second
puts another sphere on her, and she feels foggy-brained and
disoriented. Second drags her through gray tunnels, into a
room, and onto a bed, where she loses consciousness.
CHAPTER 7. BETH: THE TRUTHS
Catching abruptly stops her story. Beth senses that Catching’s
story is “true,” despite its unbelievable details; as a ghost, Beth
is open to believing the unbelievable. Though Beth orders
Michael to ask Catching to continue, Michael just tells Catching
he’ll come back later. Beth, startled, looks at Catching and
notices that telling the story has drained Catching. When
Michael asks whether he can locate a relative on Catching’s
behalf, Catching says no with a hostile expression: “I got
somebody.”
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Intense colors symbolize emotional and psychological health.
Catching retains many colors, “like a rainbow,” in the gray place
despite her mom’s death, which suggests that she remains resilient
despite her grief. Second’s prediction that Catching is going to be
“broken” and First’s desire to bring Catching “to him” hint that the
Fetchers are just agents of a more dangerous predator or abuser.
The significance of the rock like “an egg tipped on its side” isn’t clear,
but the specificity of the description foreshadows that it may be
important. Catching’s attentiveness to the hierarchy among her
captors—the “real boss,” First, and Second—suggests that questions
of who has the power are important to survival in dangerous
situations.
Second’s explanations are unhelpfully vague and circular, suggesting
that he isn’t very bright. Yet previously in the novel, intense colors
have represented emotional health, while gray has represented
traumatic grief—which indicates that “the one who takes the
colours” is likely to be a negative force, an entity who traumatizes
others.
After healing Catching, Second drugs her without her consent, an
abuse of medical power that makes clear he didn’t heal her to help
her.
Beth believes that Catching’s story is essentially “true,” but it isn’t
yet clear whether she believes all the unlikely details or simply the
story’s main gist. Michael’s decision to leave Catching alone for a
while shows his sensitivity: clearly, Catching finds narrating her
story difficult if not actively retraumatizing. Catching’s claim to
have “somebody”—even though her mom died at the beginning of
her story—may foreshadow the introduction of a character Beth
and Michael have yet to meet.
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As Michael and Beth leave, Beth sees Catching staring at
her—but tells herself that Catching was staring “through” her.
When Michael walks into the waiting room, the blond nurse
asks about the interview—and the locals perk up. Michael says
nothing about the interview but asks whether anyone has
visited the witness. The nurse says no: the witness escaped
from a “rehab clinic,” and child protective services located her
mother very recently. The mother should come in a week to
collect the girl.
As Michael walks to the parking lot, Beth asks how he can go
when the hospital doesn’t even know that Catching’s mother
has died. Michael says he doesn’t think her mother is dead.
When Beth says she’s sure Catching’s story wasn’t a lie,
Michael agrees that she was “telling the truth in a different
way”: the shimmering beasts symbolize a heat mirage, her
mother’s drowning symbolizes how her mother “abandoned”
her at the clinic, the medicine the Fetchers gave her symbolizes
her treatment, and the big storm really happened—it just didn’t
kill anyone. Given this explanation, Beth feels naïve for having
interpreted Catching’s story literally.
Michael listens to a message on his phone and says that he’s
received information about Nurse Flint and Director
Cavanagh. The police, hoping to use the men’s bank activity to
track whichever one survived, discovered that both were
wealthier than expected. Michael concludes that they were
embezzling from the home, the fire was accidental, and
Cavanagh ran because he realized his misdeeds would be
exposed in the ensuing investigation. Catching is a confused
“runaway” coincidentally found during the search.
Michael, acting frustrated, tells Beth he’s going back to the
hotel. Beth, worried that grief will overtake him without the
distraction of work, suggests that he dine out. When he claims
he’s not hungry, she begs him to eat something. He ignores her.
She yells at him that she’s “right here.” He tells her she isn’t, gets
in the car, and drives away. Beth, frustrated and lonely, wonders
why she feels more included by the rest of her family, when
they can’t see her like her dad can.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Catching seems to be looking at Beth again—another hint that
perhaps Catching can see Beth’s ghost. Meanwhile, the nurse’s
claim that the witness was in a rehab clinic and her mother is
coming to get her—even though, in Catching’s story, her mom died
while they were taking a road trip together—may cast doubt on the
literal truth of what Catching said.
Michael is skeptical toward stories with fantastical elements (even
though his daughter is a ghost), but he isn’t insensitive: he is willing
to believe that Catching was “telling the truth in a different
way”—explaining the emotional truth of events as she experienced
them—rather than lying. Beth finds his one-to-one explanation of
the fantastical elements in Catching’s story convincing, but readers
may wonder whether he accurately interpreted every element.
If Nurse Flint and Director Cavanagh were in fact embezzling from
the children’s home, that might explain the children’s unhappiness:
the men were abusing their positions of power to steal resources
from vulnerable children. Yet the story that Michael spins to fit all
the facts is rather pat and unconvincing, suggesting that he may not
have accounted for everything.
Even though Michael can see and hear Beth, he denies that she’s
“right here”—a denial implying that there is something
fundamentally wrong with her frozen-in-time existence as a ghost
haunting the world. Beth’s preference for the rest of her family’s
behavior, which make her feel good even though they can’t see her,
emphasizes that Michael’s mode of grieving is less healthy than
theirs.
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Despite knowing it’s irrational, Beth gets angry with Catching
for telling a false story and not giving Michael the illusion of a
difficult case. Beth rushes back into the hospital, phasing
through walls, and enters Catching’s room ready to yell.
Catching, noticing Beth, says: “Took you long enough.” When
Beth, flabbergasted, asks how Catching can see her, Catching
explains that her mom could see dead people. Beth infers that
Catching can too because Catching inherited all her female
ancestors’ strengths.
Catching asks Beth whether Michael murdered her and, if not,
why she’s haunting him. Beth, offended, explains that she died
in a car accident and is trying to care for her dad. Catching,
suspicious, says she’s acting like a ghost with “unfinished
business” and asks whether she received a summons to move
on. Beth begins to say no, but then she remembers that after
her death, she was traveling toward amazing colors until she
heard Michael crying.
Catching correctly intuits that Beth was moving toward the
afterlife until she came back for “that sad old man.” When Beth
implies that Michael has a right to be sad, under the
circumstances, Catching points out that he wasn’t killed in a car
accident. Though a tiny voice in Beth agrees with Catching, she
yells that Catching doesn’t understand Michael and that she
lied about the other dimension and about her dead mom, who
really just left her in rehab. As Beth’s yelling intensifies, a
lightbulb in the ceiling explodes.
Catching dives under the bed and only emerges when the
sparks from the bulb die. Beth asks whether she’s fine.
Catching says yes, “No thanks to you,” and explains that ghosts
can affect the physical world when they’re feeling intense
emotions. Now that Beth has spent her anger blowing up a
lightbulb, she recognizes that Catching thought Michael was
hurting Beth and was trying to help her, albeit in “her own
unique way.” She apologizes for her behavior.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Though at first Beth sensed that Catching’s story was true, she now
discounts it because she no longer believes its details to be literally
true—which suggests she doesn’t yet understand symbolic or
allegorical storytelling. The revelation that Catching inherited the
ability to see ghosts from her mother—as she inherited all her
female ancestors’ strengths—again emphasizes that Catching’s
Aboriginal heritage is a source of resilience, despite the racist
government policies her family has suffered under.
When Catching sees Beth haunting Michael, her first guess is that
Michael murdered his daughter—a disturbing conclusion that
suggests Catching may be familiar with men abusing or harming
girls. Yet Beth’s “unfinished business” is her father’s paralyzing grief,
not her own desire for vengeance. In the novel, intense colors
represent emotional and psychological health; the revelation that
Beth was initially headed for intense colors suggests that moving
on—not remaining frozen in time in the physical world—will
ultimately be the right choice for her.
Catching is somewhat unfair to Michael here: a father whose
daughter has died in a car accident does have a right to be sad. Yet
given the unusual circumstances—Beth is stuck frozen in time in the
physical world, haunting her father—Catching has good reason to
suggest that Beth should be trying to take care of herself, not her
adult parent. Beth’s volatile reaction to Catching shows that she
isn’t ready to hear this truth at this time.
Initially, Catching thought that Michael had murdered Beth.
Subsequently, she realized that Michael is harming Beth by freezing
in the real world with his grief—a different kind of harm, showing
that family dynamics can be unhealthy without being abusive or
violent. When Catching helps Beth understand how she can affect
the world and Beth apologizes for blowing up the lightbulb, it
suggests that a rapport is growing between the two girls.
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Catching asks Beth her name. When she learns that it’s Beth
Teller, she asks whether a “white boss” invented that name too.
Beth explains that she inherited her surname from Michael, not
her mother, and that it’s only symbolic insofar as her father
“tells what’s right from what’s wrong.” Then, privately, she
thinks he’s lost that ability in grief. Now she’s the one reminding
him to do the right thing, like call her Aunty Viv—but he refuses
to hear what she’s saying.
Beth asks whether Catching’s mother knew of ghosts who
could touch people. When Catching asks whether Beth wants
to hold Michael’s hand indefinitely, Beth says no—but both girls
can tell she’s lying. Catching tells Beth to leave and not return
until she wants help reaching the afterlife. Beth leaves,
planning to come back when Catching isn’t so annoyed with
her.
Beth can teleport to Michael if she thinks about him hard, but
she decides to walk to the hotel so he’ll be asleep—not
crying—when she arrives. Yet when she finds him asleep, he
looks like he’s “caving in on himself.” She wonders whether she
might have better options than trying to help him return to his
pre-grief self. Feeling disloyal, she tells herself she just needs to
figure out how to touch her dad again and maybe become
visible to the rest of her family.
Yet when Beth imagines appearing to her other family, she
imagines Aunty June frowning and shaking her head. Aunty
June used to call Beth a “butterfly girl” because she lived in the
present like her mom did, never burdened by the past. Beth
knows her Aunty June wouldn’t like to see her “heavy with the
weight” of Michael’s grief. She’s not sure what she should do or
how she can help her father. She starts crying—only because
her father is asleep and can’t witness it.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
This passage explores a parallel between Catching and Beth: both
feel that they have inherited abilities from the forebears whose
names they carry. But whereas Catching derives resilience from the
memory of her strong female forebears, Beth believes that her
father’s grief has stripped away his ability to tell “what’s right from
what’s wrong.”
Beth has identified no definite end-point for her haunting of her
grief-stricken father, a revelation that shows how his grief has
trapped her, preventing her from growing in the afterlife and making
future-oriented choices. Though Catching’s ultimatum to Beth is
harsh, it springs from a place of concern about Beth’s wellbeing,
which highlights the girls’ growing rapport.
Beth can see that grief is causing her father to collapse emotionally,
represented by his look of “caving in on himself.” While her attempts
to comfort him haven’t helped, she suppresses her negative
thoughts and plans to double down on denying her own death,
remaining as lifelike as possible rather than moving on to the
afterlife. This reaction shows how Beth, in reacting to her father’s
grief, is stunting her own personal growth.
Before her death, Beth was a present-oriented, joyful person.
Unfortunately, Michael’s grief has trapped her in the moment of her
death—she is literally always wearing the dress she died in—and
convinced her not to move on to the afterlife. After imagining her
Aunty June’s reaction to her situation, Beth consciously
acknowledges that bearing the burden of her father’s grief has
trapped her and made her “heavy,” not free and light like a butterfly.
Yet, perhaps to her credit, she is unwilling to leave him behind while
he is so devastated.
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CHAPTER 8. BETH: THE STATION
Beth, who doesn’t sleep, thinks all night. She decides to tell
Michael that Catching can see her, in the hopes that Michael
will become reinvested in the case and Catching’s story, which
Beth suspects symbolizes more “terrible” events than just
rehab. Beth is sure that if Michael knows something harmful
happened to Catching, he’ll help her, which will “help him too.”
Beth worries that this plan could lead to Catching telling
Michael that Beth has to move on, deepening his grief, but she
doesn’t have a better idea.
In the morning, Michael’s phone rings. It’s his boss, Rachel Ali.
After they talk, Michael tells Beth that apparently, the
unidentified corpse was stabbed with a “curved blade” before it
burned. He also explains that he’s supposed to find Alexander
Sholt’s address, since Sholt was financially involved with the
home: after a closer look at Nurse Flint and Director
Cavanagh’s bank accounts, the police have decided the men
probably weren’t embezzling but “being paid off for something.”
Michael speculates that maybe the home was dealing
prescription medications as drugs—but if so, he wonders why
he hasn’t heard more about drug problems in the area. Beth,
happy that he’s thinking about the case, tells him to get moving.
As Michael and Beth drive to the local police station, she
decides not to tell him that Catching can see her. She enjoys
having a secret with Catching; it feels like having “a friend.”
When Beth and Michael arrive at the station, Beth asks
whether Rachel was mad that Michael didn’t talk to the local
cops his first day in town. Michael admits that it would’ve been
the appropriate thing to do, but the town’s similarity to his
hometown made him want to investigate alone first: towns like
that can hide secrets.
Inside the station, a drab blond policeman introduces himself to
Michael as Derek Bell. Beth notices a photo of a teen Derek
with a man in a police uniform and guesses that Derek’s dad
was a policeman too. Derek says he’s been told Michael has
already started asking people questions about the case.
Michael says he’s sorry for not coming to the station
sooner—he just wanted to get started. Derek, still annoyed,
implies that it was rude of Michael not to check with them
before conducting interviews.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
When angry at Catching, Beth yelled that her story was false, but in
this scene, Beth clearly recognizes that the fantastical elements in
Catching’s story might symbolize “terrible” true events. Here Beth
recognizes that for her justice-oriented father, helping people
“help[s] him too”—which in turn hints that Michael needs to broaden
his focus beyond Beth to heal from his grief.
Upon hearing that Flint and Cavanagh’s bank accounts were
suspicious, Michael first hypothesized that they were embezzling
from the home. The new information that they were likely “being
paid off for something” motivates him to tell a different story based
on the available evidence: perhaps the men were dealing
prescription medications intended for the children. While this
hypothesis may not be true either, the successive stories Michael
creates based on new evidence show how storytelling can be used
as a tool to try to uncover the truth.
Here, Beth makes explicit that her growing rapport with Catching
might be a friendship—a peer-to-peer relationship outside of the
overly intense, grief-based bond she shares with Michael. Michael’s
admission that he was avoiding the local police because the town
reminds him of his hometown foreshadows that the local police may
be bigoted or corrupt the way Michael’s father was.
Derek’s hostility to Michael may simply derive from a territorial
sense that the local police don’t need out-of-town detectives to help
them—or it may hint that Derek is hiding something and doesn’t
want external oversight.
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Michael, without naming Rachel, blames pressure from his boss
for his speed. He says he understands the struggles of rural
policing because his own father was “the local cop” in a similar
town. Derek, instantly friendlier, says his father was too. Beth
realizes that her dad—who taught her to notice
details—noticed the photo of Derek’s dad too. When Derek
asks whether the witness was helpful, Michael implies that she
was just a whiny teen. Beth, noticing Derek’s “relief,” realizes
Michael has intentionally redirected Derek’s interest away
from Catching. Inferring that Derek is a suspect, she notices
that he chews his fingernails and looks like he hasn’t been
sleeping.
Michael asks Derek for Alexander Sholt’s address. When Derek
says, “Alex?”, Michael asks whether he and Alexander are
friends. Derek says they went to school together and that
everyone in town knows the Sholts, who give money to “local
causes.” Michael explains that because the case is officially a
homicide, he has to look more closely at the children’s
home—but Alexander hasn’t been answering any calls. Then he
asks whether Derek has heard about the new autopsy findings.
Derek, seeming nauseated, asks whether Michael thinks
Alexander is involved. When Michael says he’s only trying to
learn more about the home, Beth thinks Derek looks happier.
Derek says that he’ll get Alexander Sholt’s address but that
Alexander’s probably at his city apartment. When Michael says
that they’ve checked that address, Derek seems taken aback.
He says the way to Alexander’s house is confusing and insists
on sending his second-in-command with Michael. When he
leaves to find said second-in-command, Beth excitedly suggests
that Derek is nervous because he and Alexander were selling
drugs together. Michael points out that the Sholts seem
wealthy enough not to need a drug business and that Derek
could be nervous for other reasons. He speculates that, like his
own father, Derek gives people like the Sholts “special
treatment” and turned a blind eye to things he shouldn’t have.
Beth asks why Michael redirected Derek’s attention from
Catching. Michael explains that he doesn’t trust Derek not to
repeat things to Alexander Sholt—and if Catching witnessed
anything the night of the fire, Michael wants her to tell him.
Derek returns with a redhead who introduces herself as Allison
Hartley but asks Michael to call her “Allie.” Derek says that Allie
will escort Michael to Alexander’s; he explains that he has to
keep searching for Director Cavanagh or he’d do it. As Michael
and Allie drive off, Beth stays behind to see what Derek will do.
Derek looks up and down the street—and startles when the
wind rattles a can. Beth realizes that Derek is scared.
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Michael has a bad relationship to his own father, a bigoted police
officer who disowned him for dating an Aboriginal woman—but
when he mentions that his father was “the local cop,” Derek is happy
to admit that his was too. Derek’s reaction suggests that he has a
better relationship with his father than Michael does, though
whether that’s because Derek’s father isn’t bigoted or because
Derek is remains to be seen. Derek’s sleeplessness and chewed nails
suggest that he’s nervous about something but don’t reveal what.
Derek’s obvious familiarity with Alexander Sholt and relief when
Michael implies that Alexander isn’t a suspect suggest that he may
be biased in Alexander’s favor if Alexander is a suspect, though he
attempts to play off his partiality by explaining that the Sholts give
money to “local causes” (i.e. that they support the whole
community). Derek’s obvious personal biases in the case hint that
the local police may not have investigated well or fairly.
Beth and Michael’s conflicting stories about why Derek might be
nervous once again illustrate how storytelling can be used as a tool
to aid thought as people try to figure out the truth. When Michael
compares Derek’s relationship to the Sholts to his father’s implied
racist preference for white people, it suggests that giving “special
treatment” to privileged people or groups is a widespread problem in
law enforcement.
When Michael suggests that Derek would leak details about the
investigation about the case to Alexander Sholt, it emphasizes that
he doesn’t necessarily trust other police officers not to show bias in
favor of the rich and privileged. Derek’s fearful reactions when he
believes he’s alone do suggest that he’s nervous about
something—but not what he’s nervous about.
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CHAPTER 9. BETH: THE MISSING
Beth rejoins Michael and Allie in the car. As Allie drives,
Michael asks whether she went to school with Derek and
Alexander Sholt. She says she did, though they were a little
older. Alexander went to boarding school for a while but
returned after his grandfather, Oscar Sholt, spent too much of
the family money preparing for the apocalypse he believed was
coming. Alexander made a lot of that money back on the stock
market as an adult. Beth, knowing Allie can’t hear her, suggests
that Alexander made the money back dealing drugs or
committing other crimes.
Allie praises Alexander Sholt’s charity, mentioning that some
townspeople didn’t want him to set up the home. Others
wanted to volunteer there, but unfortunately, they were told
that by law, only people employed at the home could work
there. Beth asks Michael whether that’s a real law. When he
shakes his head slightly, she suggests that Alexander fabricated
it to keep townspeople from the home.
Allie praises Alexander Sholt’s decision to stay in town and
suggests that, if she had money, she’d leave—but then corrects
herself, saying that she’d stay. When Michael asks what
changed, Allie explains that her childhood best friend, Sarah
Blue, vanished “twenty years . . . seven months . . . six days” ago,
at age 14, after getting off the school bus one day. Derek’s
father (Gerry Bell), who investigated her disappearance,
believed she’d run away, but Allie is convinced that Sarah
wouldn’t have done that without telling her parents. Allie
admits she still wants to find Sarah, though Derek has told her
it’s a pipe dream.
When Michael says that the police “never stop looking for the
missing,” Allie fumblingly asks him to look at Sarah’s file. He
agrees—and she admits that it’s in the glove compartment.
Beth, laughing, suggests to her dad that Allie has had the file on
her ever since she heard an experienced detective was coming
to town. Michael nods, smiling, and Beth knows he approves of
Allie’s determination. When he examines the file, Beth sneaks a
look and sees a photo of Sarah, an Aboriginal girl with a fierce
expression.
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Many of the powerful people in town—rich man Alexander Sholt,
police officers Derek and Allie—went to school together, which hints
that in small towns, law-enforcement bias in favor of the privileged
can be compounded by close personal relationships.
While Michael suspects the local police of bias and corruption,
Allie’s belief in a law that Alexander may have invented to keep
people away from the home hints that she’s been duped, rather than
being a participant in corruption or crime.
Allie has been counting the years, months, and days since her friend
Sarah disappeared. This obsessive focus betrays the depth both of
Allie’s friendship and her trauma: her 14-year-old best friend’s
disappearance has frozen part of her in time, similar to the way that
Beth’s death has frozen Beth in time and kept Michael obsessed
with the circumstances of her passing. Gerry Bell’s claim that Sarah
had just run away implies that he wasn’t taking the disappearance
of a young girl particularly seriously—which casts doubt on the
quality of the local police department.
Prior to this point, Michael has been suspicious and covertly
contemptuous of the local police department, which he fears will be
full of bigots like his father. Yet his claim that the police “never stop
looking for the missing” suggests he has an idealized image of what
law enforcement could be, even if he doesn’t believe many police
officers live up to it. Allie has clearly jumped on the chance for a
seasoned detective to look at Sarah’s file, an eagerness that shows
both her grief and the power of her friendship with Sarah.
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Michael suggests that Sarah Blue’s file is pretty scanty. Allie
agrees. Derek claims his father, Gerry Bell, did everything he
could, but when Allie talked to Gerry Bell about the case, he
was standoffish. Allie thinks that Gerry believed Sarah would
“be back anytime.” When she asks Michael how the case could
be pursued in the present, he suggests doing all the legwork
over again and offers to help Allie with it after the current case
ends.
Allie smiles so intensely at Michael’s offer to help that Beth is
shocked. Beth thinks that she’ll need to be more perceptive
about people’s hidden qualities if she wants to follow in her
father’s footsteps as a detective—and then realizes that’s not
going to happen anyway, since she’s dead. She wonders about
“mov[ing] on” but stops herself, blaming Catching for the
thought. Instead she spins a fantasy that she’ll find her mom in
the afterlife and bring her back to exist as a half-ghost family
with her and her dad.
The car reaches Alexander Sholt’s house, a large brick building.
Beth notes that it wasn’t hard to locate the way Derek claimed
and concludes that Derek sent Allie so she could spy for him.
Likely thinking the same thing, Michael asks to interview
Alexander alone. When Allie agrees without arguing, Beth
concludes that she didn’t want to spy for Derek.
Michael knocks on the Sholt house’s door. A sickly, unfriendly
old man opens it. When Michael asks for Alexander Sholt, the
old man—who identifies himself as Alexander’s father, Charles
Sholt—claims that Alexander departed for the city earlier that
day. Michael indicates with a subtle eye movement that he
wants Beth to search the house. Inside, she finds a bedroom on
the second floor with a shattered window, a few black hairs
stuck to the frame. She recalls that Director Cavanagh had
black hair in the photo she saw and wonders whether he broke
in.
Beth, finding nothing else, returns to Michael and explains what
she saw. Michael tells Charles Sholt he needs to go but leaves
his card for Alexander. As he and Beth return to the car, he
explains that he can’t search the house based on testimony
from a ghost—but he does think that what she found is
intriguing, and he’ll start investigating the Sholts more
intensively. Beth is happily imagining her future as “Beth Teller,
ghost-detective” when Allie jumps from the car, holding her
phone, and tells Michael that two people have been discovered
stabbed to death.
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Here Allie makes explicit that she thinks Gerry Bell did a bad job
with the initial investigation because he didn’t take Sarah’s
disappearance seriously enough, claiming she’d be “back anytime.”
Allie’s judgments reflect poorly on Gerry and Derek, while
suggesting that Allie is a critical thinker, not blindly loyal to her boss
Derek.
Michael isn’t the only one grieving: Beth is also grieving the life
possibilities she lost when she died, such as the possibility of
becoming a detective. The foreclosure of these possibilities makes
Beth want to think about “mov[ing] on” to a new existence in the
afterlife, but she forces herself to focus on an unlikely, backward-
looking fantasy instead, because she’s not yet ready to grow and
change.
If Derek wants to spy on Michael’s investigation, it indicates that he
didn’t want outside oversight of the case because he has something
to hide. Allie jumps on the excuse not to spy, which bolsters readers’
suspicion that she’s innocent of whatever wrongdoing is going on in
the local police force.
Though Michael cares about justice, he’s not above sending his
ghost daughter to search a suspect’s house without a warrant—a
detail revealing that even well-meaning police officers sometimes
abuse power they have access to, in small or large ways. The
shattered window may be a coincidence, or it may suggest that
Alexander and Charles Sholt are hiding some act of violence.
On the drive to the Sholt house, Beth acknowledged to herself that
she has no future as a detective due to her early, accidental
death—yet when she finds helpful information for Michael, she
represses her knowledge that her death is irreversible and fantasizes
about unlikely scenarios like “Beth Teller, ghost-detective.” This
tendency reveals that Michael’s grief isn’t the only thing trapping
Beth in the physical world; she is also unwilling to give up the future
she thought she would have and move on to something else.
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CHAPTER 10. BETH: THE DEATHS
Allie, Michael, and Beth drive across town to a stormwater
drain surrounded by a fence. Police cars are parked nearby.
When they exit the car, Derek—looking shocked—informs them
that the bodies found in the drain belong to Director Cavanagh
and Nurse Flint, both stabbed to death. Beth wonders who the
unidentified body belonged to, then. While Allie goes to
reassure some townspeople gathering nearby, Derek tells
Michael that the bodies weren’t killed here and takes him to
look at the dumping site. As Michael walks away, he gives Beth
a look warning her not to go near the murdered bodies.
Beth wonders whether Cavanagh and Flint’s ghosts will appear
because they were murdered, the way Catching thought Beth
herself was haunting Michael because she’d been murdered.
Somehow, though, she’s sure that their ghosts won’t appear
and that they didn’t have any “unfinished business.”
Michael returns, talking on the phone. Beth hears him say that
“something [is] off.” When he hangs up, she asks him what he
meant. He explains that Rachel is sending more police; he
wants colleagues who don’t work for Derek, whom Michael
believes is withholding information. When Beth implies that
they should talk to the kids who were living in the home again,
Michael says that they’re unlikely to talk to authorities—and
that, according to Rachel, the kids seem oddly unconcerned
about the case, as if “everything’s been taken care of.”
Beth thinks about the children isolated from the townspeople
who wanted to help them and used as cover for drug dealing or
some other criminal behavior. She blurts out that the situation
at the children’s home was wrong. Michael agrees but says that
Rachel will help the kids while he deals with the case in town.
He mentions that the fence surrounding the drain was locked
and they don’t know how the murderer got in to dump the
bodies.
Allie walks up to Michael. When he asks whether she knew
Cavanagh and Flint, she says they weren’t outgoing. Fixing her
eyes on a bus stop past the drain, she mentions that that’s
where Sarah Blue disembarked right before she disappeared.
Beth shouts that the events must be connected—but realizes
that Cavanagh and Flint, who weren’t from this town originally,
likely never knew Sarah. When Michael asks whether anyone
who lives nearby heard anything, Allie says that an old woman
claims large wings were beating overhead the night before.
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Derek’s apparently genuine shock at Cavanagh and Flint’s deaths
hints that whatever has made him so nervous about external
oversight of the case, he may not be the two men’s murderer.
Meanwhile, the revelation that the unidentified body in the home
was not Nurse Flint reveals that the stories Michael has been trying
to tell to explain the case have been inaccurate in an extremely
important respect.
Implicitly, Beth is acknowledging that unlike Flint and Cavanagh,
she herself does have “unfinished business”—that is, it’s grief and
trauma, rather than a choice, that’s frozen her in the physical world.
Michael’s request for his own colleagues suggests that Michael
doesn’t distrust other police officers per se: he believes that corrupt
or abusive policing may be a problem in Derek’s jurisdiction—and
jurisdictions like Derek’s—in particular. The children’s apparent
believe that “everything’s been taken care of” after the fire implies
that they’re glad the home burned down—which, in turn,
foreshadows ominous revelations about the home.
The vulnerability of parentless children to isolation and exploitation
at government-approved children’s homes emphasizes that the law
can create opportunities for abuse even when it intends to help
people. The revelation that the murderer managed to dump bodies
behind a locked fence highlights that the police don’t understand
how the murderer is committing the crimes, or what connections
the murderer might have.
Beth immediately links Sarah Blue’s long-ago disappearance to the
dumping of Cavanagh and Flint’s bodies because they occurred
around the same place—which shows that she’s thinking like a
detective, who distrusts coincidences, and not like a scientist, for
whom correlation does not equal causation. Though Beth comes to
doubt her first instinct, the novel may be hinting that Beth is right to
trust detective-like, suspicious storytelling over rational scientific
storytelling in this situation.
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Beth thinks of Fetchers. When she mentions this to Michael, he
shakes his head, but—terrified on Catching’s behalf—she
teleports to Catching anyway. She babbles about the murders,
wings, and Fetchers until Catching says, with total certainty,
that Fetchers aren’t coming to get her. Seeing Beth’s
disorientation, Catching tells her to sit and thanks her for the
warning anyway. Beth says, “It’s what fr—” but cuts herself off
before saying “friends.” When Catching finishes the phrase,
Beth asks whether they’re friends. Catching says that they are:
friends “always tell each other the truth. Even when it hurts,”
and she told Beth the hurtful truth about her relationship to
Michael.
Beth says that Michael will probably follow her to the hospital
and admits that she hasn’t told him that Catching can see her.
Catching volunteers not to tell him either, because keeping
secrets is another characteristic of friendship. She says that in
“the beneath-place,” she had a friend who told her the truth “as
she saw it.” When Beth asks whether these truths hurt,
Catching instinctively fists her sheets. Beth becomes more
certain that terrible things have happened to Catching, and
she’s anxious about what happened to Catching’s friend too.
Beth says that Michael can help Catching. Catching says her
story isn’t a cry for help. When Beth asks why she’s telling it,
Catching replies, “To be heard.” Beth suggests that that “sounds
like” a cry for help and that Catching might need help even if
she isn’t asking for it. The girls sit in silence for a moment, but it
isn’t awkward. When Michael enters the hospital room,
Catching asks whether he wants to hear more of her story.
Michael asks whether she’s going to mention the fire, and she
says no: “The next part is about my friend. And the grey.”
CHAPTER 11. CATCHING: THE PRISONER
When Catching wakes, a voice greets her. When she asks who
it is, the voice—hiding in a room’s shadows—sings an eerie song
about a “dead girl” and “one more for the Feed.” Catching
demands the voice’s name. It offers to trade. When Catching
introduces herself, the voice introduces itself as Crow.
Catching asks Crow to come out of the shadows. Though Crow
warns Catching that it will be scary, Catching suggests that
Crow hiding while “singing creepy songs” is scarier. Crow
moves slowly into the light; she’s a girl with inward-turning feet
and unnaturally long nails whose skin, hair, and eyes are all
gray.
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Earlier, Beth decided not to tell Michael that Catching could see her
because having a secret with Catching made her feel like they were
friends. By implication, Beth wants friendships outside of her grief-
suffocated family relationship to Michael. Here, readers learn that
Catching reciprocates Beth’s desire to be friends: when she told
Beth her truthful opinion about Michael, she was cementing their
friendship. Catching’s insistence that friendship means telling the
truth both emphasizes the importance of truth and implies that
Catching thinks the fantastical story she has been telling Beth and
Michael is true in some sense.
Earlier, when Michael asked Catching about whether she had any
social support, she told him that she’d “got someone.” Now Catching
reveals that she had a friend in “the beneath-place,” that is, the
tunnels where the Fetchers took her. It’s not clear whether these
two characters, Catching’s current social support and her friend in
captivity, are one and the same. Catching’s claim that her friend told
the truth “as she saw it” indicates that a person can try to tell the
truth and still give other people false, incomplete, or biased stories:
people’s perspectives are limited. Catching’s instinctive, pained
reaction to Beth’s question, meanwhile, hints that Catching was
harmed or abused during captivity.
Catching claims that she is telling her story “to be heard,” which
indicates that sometimes, people tell stories simply to express
themselves or help listeners understand their perspective, not to get
something from their listeners. When Beth suggests that wanting to
be heard “sounds like” a cry for help, on the other hand, it suggests
that sometimes people want to be heard and understood as a way
of working through painful experiences such as traumas.
Crow’s song about a “dead girl” seems to imply that something
called “the Feed” plans to kill Catching. An intelligent girl, Catching
understands the implication and derides Crow’s song as “creepy.”
Previously, gray has symbolized emotional numbness or collapse
due to grief or trauma. As such, Crow’s monochromatically gray
appearance implies that she has been traumatized and may feel
emotionally numb as a result.
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Crow asks whether Catching is afraid. Catching says no: Crow
is “a girl” like Catching. Crow retorts that they aren’t the same:
Catching has colors—at least until “they” arrive. When
Catching asks whether Crow means the Fetchers, Crow says
the Fetchers just work for the Feed, who devours the “colours
that live in our souls.” Catching realizes that Crow wasn’t
always gray; the Feed ate her colors. She asks how long Crow
has been captive, and Crow replies that she’s been there “since
the Feed began,” trying to aid the other girls. When Catching
demands help escaping, Crow suggests that the only escape is
death. Crow returns to the shadows, hiding as First and Second
appear. They toss Catching bread, which paralyzes her when
she eats it.
CHAPTER 12. CATCHING: THE FEED
First and Second carry a paralyzed Catching to a room, where
they deposit her on the floor and withdraw. From the shadows
emerges the Feed, a white monster with sticklike limbs and
eyes made of “mirrors.” The Feed picks Catching up, puts her on
a table, and pulls up her shirt. He shoves his fingers into her
stomach below her navel, ripping her flesh; when he pulls his
fingers out, colors cover them. He eats Catching’s colors from
his fingers. Though Catching wants to scream in agony, she
can’t.
CHAPTER 13. CATCHING: THE GREY
Back in her room, Catching feels like a broken object whose
pieces will never be recovered. Crow asks whether Catching is
upset about the bread. She explains that the Fetchers will make
Catching eat, and that there will be drugs in the food if they’re
planning to bring her to the Feed. When Catching won’t
respond, Crow—distressed—asks what she could have done:
“No one gets away.” Catching asks about the other girls, and
Crow sadly implies that the Feed eats them until they die.
Catching vows to escape.
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In Catching’s fantastical story-world, colors, which have previously
symbolized positive emotions and psychological health, can be
devoured by monsters like the Feed, rendering their victims gray, a
shade that represents trauma and emotional paralysis. If readers
take Catching’s story literally, Crow’s explanation suggests that the
Feed eats everything good “that lives in our souls” till its victims die;
figuratively, the Feed seems to represent predators or abusers whose
actions destroy their victims psychologically. Crow’s total grayness
and her claim that she’s been in the tunnels “since the Feed began”
hints that she may be a ghost. Her claim that she’s been trying to
help the other victims (all girls) suggests that she is trying to
befriend and aid Catching in her own way—and thus that she is the
“beneath-place” friend Catching mentioned to Beth.
If readers take Catching’s fantastical story as an allegorical
representation of a realistic trauma, the Feed’s violent penetration
of Catching’s lower abdomen seems to symbolize a sexual assault.
In that interpretation, the Feed’s devouring girls’ colors represents
how sexual assault traumatizes its victims, stealing their positive
emotions and psychological health.
When Crow asks whether Catching is upset about the bread, she’s
really asking whether Catching is upset that Crow didn’t warn her
the bread was drugged. Her subsequent explanations make clear
that she doesn’t believe any warning would have helped Catching.
That Crow bothers to explain to Catching reveals that she wants to
be Catching’s friend. Her claim that “no one gets away” and the
revelation that all the Feed’s victims have died, meanwhile, hints
that Crow has been traumatized not only by her own death but by
the many subsequent deaths she has witnessed.
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Crow tells Catching that she can escape by becoming dead and
emotionless, so she won’t “mind being a grey girl.” When
Catching says that she won’t become gray, Crow indicates
Catching’s arm—where, Catching sees, the Feed’s fingermarks
have turned part of her skin gray. Catching tries to scratch off
the gray part but can’t. Crow explains that Catching won’t be
able to get rid of the gray because it’s hers: “everyone’s gray is
their own.” Then she suggests that Catching would be less
upset if she were dead. When Catching snaps at her, Crow
snaps back: “Fine! Put all your screams upon your shoulders
and let them crush you!” Then Crow retreats to the shadows.
Catching, staring at her gray skin, wonders how she can live
with the Feed’s fingermarks on her. She begins silently reciting
her female ancestors’ names, but when she reaches her
grandmother, she forgets what she’s supposed to say. Thinking
frantically, she recalls the name: “Grandma Leslie Catching.”
The name triggers a memory of her mom, explaining to her that
the government took her Aboriginal Grandma Leslie away from
her family when she was a child. To survive the terrible place
where she’d been taken, Leslie recalled the “old rocks” of her
childhood home and fashioned her own strength after theirs.
She survived till adulthood and went to find her family.
Catching tells herself that she’s not a broken object—so long as
she remembers her ancestors, she can be a rock. She asks
Crow to help her with something. When Crow, pouting, says
that she was helping, Catching promises to consider becoming
emotionless and dead if Crow will help. She asks Crow to recite
the words “Granny,” “Nanna,” “Grandma,” “Mum,” and “Me.” She
figures that Crow can help her remember her ancestors until
she escapes and takes revenge on the Feed.
CHAPTER 14. BETH: THE COLOURS
After hearing Catching’s story, Beth and Michael are furious.
Michael tells Catching that he can protect her and her friend
(Crow) from anyone who has hurt them. Catching, with a hard
expression, says it’s “too late” to help her and that her friend is
no longer “in trouble.” Michael gives Catching his card and asks
whether she wants to say anything else; when she stays silent
and closes her eyes, he leaves the room with a promise to come
visit again the next day.
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The gray fingermarks on Catching’s arm represent how the Feed’s
violent assault has traumatized her, stealing the intense colors that
symbolize positive emotion and psychological health. “Being a grey
girl” seems to represent a state in which the Feed’s victim has lost all
capacity for positive emotion. Crow argues that this loss is specific
to each victim—“everyone’s gray is their own.” She also believes that
if Catching allows herself to feel negative emotions, “screams,”
rather than numbing herself to all emotion, she’ll be “crush[ed].”
Thus Crow’s advice, though fatalistic and hopeless, comes from a
place of care and friendship.
Like Catching’s Nanna Sadie, her Grandma Leslie Catching
belonged to the “Stolen Generations,” children forcibly removed
from their Aboriginal families to be assimilated into white culture at
group facilities or in foster care. This passage implicitly parallels the
Feed’s assault on Catching to the government’s assault on
Aboriginal family integrity, suggesting that both assaults were
immoral, traumatizing abuses of power.
Despite her trauma, Catching draws strength from her family
relationships. This suggests that Catching’s Aboriginal heritage is a
source of power for her, despite the historical atrocities her
Aboriginal ancestors suffered. It also implies that victims can
overcome trauma with the help of loving communities. In this
moment, Catching draws Crow into her community as a friend by
asking her to help Catching memorialize Catching’s strong female
ancestors.
Catching’s claim that it’s “too late” to help her is ambiguous: it may
mean that the trauma she’s suffered is irreversible—or that she
succeeded in overcoming it before Michael arrived. Similarly, her
claim that Crow is no longer “in trouble” could mean that Crow is
irretrievably dead or that she’s escaped the Feed. In either case,
Beth and Michael’s distress at Catching’s story reveals that while
they may not believe in the fantastical details, they interpreted the
Feed’s assault as an allegory for a real, horrible attack on Catching.
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Once Michael has left, Catching opens her eyes again. Beth,
feeling powerless, offers to help Catching herself—and
Catching retorts that Beth should help herself and realize that
she and her dad can’t return to the past. Beth wants to
contradict Catching, but she knows she can’t: her death has
made her and her dad permanently “different.” Catching looks
at Beth’s face, smiles a little, and tells her to leave for now.
Beth finds Michael on his phone in the parking lot. When he
hangs up, he explains that he’s trying to get information about
Catching’s rehab facility. He’s sure that someone did something
terrible to Catching, but he’s not sure he can figure out more
unless she tells him more. Beth doubts Catching will: she now
believes that Catching does just want to be “heard”—because
Catching thinks she can take care of herself.
Aunty Viv calls Michael. When he doesn’t pick up, Beth tells him
he’ll have to talk to Aunty Viv at Grandpa Jim’s upcoming 82nd
birthday party anyway. Michael says he won’t attend, and when
Beth insists that he should, he snaps at her. Afterward, he
apologizes for his tone and opens the car door for her—which
she doesn’t need, since as a ghost she can pass through solid
objects. Beth realizes that the day before, she would have
cared more about not upsetting her father than pressing him
on the birthday—but things have changed. Instead of getting
into the car, she runs away, straight through the hospital and
into the streets on the other side.
Walking aimlessly, Beth thinks how awful it is that Michael
would skip the party for Grandpa Jim, who loved Beth intensely
and treated Michael like his own child. Besides, this will be the
first family birthday party since Beth’s death—and if her father
no-shows, he’ll hurt the entire family. Beth wonders whether,
rather than helping her father return to his pre-grief self, she
should have been helping him learn “how to live in a world”
where his daughter had died.
Suddenly, Beth realizes that a large shadow is hovering
ominously over her. She runs out from under the shadow, but it
chases her. For a moment, she thinks it’s going to catch
her—but then she realizes that, without a material body, she
can run as fast as she wants. She puts on a burst of speed that
fills her with pleasure and a sense of being “alive.” Abruptly, the
shadow vanishes, and a “sea of colours” appears ahead of Beth.
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Catching keeps urging Beth to do what’s best for herself, showing
that she is a true friend to Beth. Beth’s realization that her death
made her and her dad “different” suggests that Beth can’t stay
frozen as she was when she died.
Michael still believes that his first attempt at decoding Catching’s
fantastical allegory was correct; as such, he assumes that the
tunnels represent rehab. Despite his hasty assumptions, Michael
does acknowledge that there are limits to what he can figure out
without hard information. Beth, meanwhile, is arriving at her own
interpretation of Catching: she has decided that Catching wants to
be “heard” but not helped because she knows she can help herself,
not because she’s beyond help. This interpretation suggests that
trauma has not psychologically paralyzed Catching the way grief
has paralyzed Michael.
Michael is still treating Beth as if she’s alive, opening the car door for
her as if she has a physical body. Perhaps due to Catching’s tough
but friendly encouragement, Beth is no longer willing to play along
with Michael as he pretends that nothing has changed for Beth
since the day she died. Beth’s decision to leave rather than let her
dad continue to pretend things are normal suggests that she has
realized that she can’t solve her dad’s unhealthy grief simply by
trying to avoid upsetting him.
Here Beth is realizing that she cannot freeze or reverse time for her
father. Now that she’s died, things are never going to be the same for
them. Teaching him “how to live in a world” where she’s dead is thus
framed as a healthier way to address his grief than pretending
nothing has changed.
Beth feels “alive” and happy when she acknowledges that she has
died and uses her lack of physical body to her own benefit. This
paradoxical reaction hints that Beth as well as Michael will be
happier when she fully accepts the fact of her own death. The
sudden appearance of a “sea of colours” in this moment emphasizes
that accepting her death is good for Beth, since intense colors in the
novel represent positive emotions and psychological health.
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The colors exert an enormous emotional pull on Beth, and
they’re singing a song “like a mother might sing to her child.”
Beth realizes that her mom is waiting for her on the “other
side”—but also, her mother has been speaking to Beth her
whole life, in a positive and resilient voice that Beth believed
was internal. In an instant, Beth understands that she can still
have a relationship with her living family even if she moves
on—all of them except Michael, who can’t handle Beth as a dead
girl, only as an entity as like her living self as possible. With
great difficulty, Beth turns away from the colors—and they
disappear.
Beth cries until night falls. The shadow doesn’t return, and Beth
speculates that it was a representation of her own death, trying
to get her to move on. Miserably, she trudges back to the hotel,
where she finds Michael staring at a note-covered wall with big
labels reading Catching, Sarah Blue, and “The Home.” Beth,
surprised, comments that Michael has made “one of [his]
thinking walls.” Michael sees she’s been crying and apologizes
for speaking angrily to her before. Beth doesn’t want to explain
everything that happened with the colors, so she just accepts
his apology.
Beth asks whether Michael believes that the cases are
connected. Michael says he isn’t sure, but he needs to
determine whether anyone has seen Alexander Sholt since the
fire. Beth asks whether Michael thinks Alexander is the
unidentified body—and, if so, why Charles Sholt would have
lied about seeing him. Michael speculates that perhaps Charles
is trying to stall the investigation while Derek destroys
evidence of Alexander’s crimes. Beth asks whether Michael
thinks Derek is the murderer. Michael says no—Derek seemed
too surprised by the discovery of the bodies. Beth realizes that
until recently, she would have been happy to see her dad so
involved in a case, but now she wants him truly reconnected
with life, so she can move on.
CHAPTER 15. BETH: THE COP
All night, Beth thinks about how she has to help Michael accept
her death or stay stuck in the wrong world. In the morning,
Michael takes down the notes from the wall—but hesitates
every time he starts to take down the “Sarah Blue” note. When
Beth asks him whether he’s discovered a connection between
Sarah and the current case, he says no—it’s just that Gerry Bell
completely failed to do what a detective should have done in
Sarah’s case, and no one held him to account because Sarah
was Aboriginal.
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Catching silently recites her female forebears’ names to draw on
their strength. Similarly, in this scene, Beth realizes that she has
been drawing on her deceased mother for resilience her whole life.
Since the novel uses intense colors to symbolize emotional health,
the bright colors of the “other side” suggest that deceased loved
ones can be part of the loving community that helps people heal
from grief and trauma. Unfortunately, Beth recognizes that Michael
isn’t yet ready for the growth and change that accepting her passage
to the afterlife would require—so she gives up a happy, emotionally
positive afterlife to continue haunting Michael.
Beth’s surprise that Michael has made “one of [his] thinking walls”
suggests that he used to make such walls before Beth’s death but
has been too wrapped up in grief to make another one—until now.
His decision to assemble a thinking wall at this point implies that his
desire to help Catching and get justice for Sarah Blue have partially
overridden his paralyzing grief. It isn’t clear why Beth doesn’t want
to tell Michael about the colors; perhaps, now that she’s sure the
afterlife would be wonderful, she doesn’t want to make him feel
guilty by explaining that she gave it up for him.
This scene constitutes a major turning point for Beth. Rather than
repressing her desires to move on to the afterlife, she is
acknowledging to herself that moving on is what she wants—and
that only her feelings of responsibility toward her grief-stricken dad
are preventing her from doing so. Nevertheless, Beth is still unwilling
to leave Michael: she wants him to have grown as a person and
recovered from her death before she leaves him.
This passage makes explicit what readers may already have
suspected: racism toward Aboriginal people allowed Gerry Bell’s
shoddy investigation into Sarah’s disappearance to go unchallenged.
Michael’s hesitation over the note with Sarah’s name on it suggests
that this racist failure of law enforcement bothers him deeply.
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Beth knows that Michael hates “all injustice,” particularly racism
against Aboriginal people, and wants to be very different from
anyone who stands by and lets bad things happen. Beth
abruptly asks whether he's aware that he couldn’t have saved
her life. In response, he says quietly that she was his
responsibility. When Beth suggests he might be avoiding the
birthday party because he believes the family blames him, he
says no—it’s because he loves Beth’s cousins, and he failed his
own daughter, and so he isn’t worthy of having a relationship
with her living cousins. He cuts himself off, but Beth finishes his
thought: he isn’t worthy of having a relationship with the
cousins when Beth will “never grow up.”
Beth haltingly explains to Michael that he’s being “unfair” to
everyone, including himself and her: it hurts Beth to know that
he’s hurting people because of her. Very softly, Michael
promises to “try.” Beth isn’t sure what he’ll try to do, but she
understands that he’s going to amend his behavior.
Michael has to go talk to the local police. In the car, Beth
chatters about the case to distract him from the emotional
conversation they just had. When they arrive at the station,
they’re told that Derek and Allie are talking to townspeople
who live on the street where Cavanagh and Flint were found.
Then Allie returns. When Michael asks after Derek, Allie says
that she thought he might be at the station: the previous night,
he called her to say he was sick and asked her to talk to the
townspeople without him. He hasn’t been answering her calls
today, either.
Beth suggests to Michael that Derek, terrified, might have left
town. Michael tells Allie that they should go check on him. At
Derek’s house, Michael rings the front doorbell, but no one
answers. Through a window, Allie catches sight of Derek on the
floor. Michael slams into the front door until it opens. When
Beth follows Michael and Allie inside, she sees Derek dead with
blood on his chest. Michael tells Allie that she shouldn’t work
on this case, because it will be difficult for Derek’s
acquaintances. Allie asks whether Derek was entangled in
something, and Michael says that “something was going on.”
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Readers may have wondered why Michael is so devastated by
Beth’s death when he can still see and talk to her constantly. Here,
it’s revealed that he is grieving not the end of Beth’s existence—she
still exists—but the loss of the future he thought she would have.
Because of her death, she’ll “never grow up” in a normal way.
Moreover, irrational self-blame is fueling Michael’s grief: he doesn’t
want to be a bystander to injustice, and Beth’s death seems
cosmically unjust, so he believes he should have done something
about it.
Because Michael hates injustice, Beth tries to change his behavior
by pointing out he’s being unfair: to himself in his irrational self-
blame and to her by making her the cause of his hurtful behavior.
This tactic works: Michael promises to “try,” which implies that he’ll
try to reconnect with his in-laws and stop blaming himself for Beth’s
death.
Beth decides to drop the fraught, grief-haunted topic that she and
Michael were just discussing to allow him to work. This decision
implies that personal growth and healing don’t progress linearly;
they start and stop according to what the people involved can bear.
Meanwhile, Derek’s suspicious no-show suggests once again that he
is a corrupt cop.
When Michael and Allie find Derek dead, Allie immediately guesses
that he might have been involved with something suspect—which
suggests either that Allie had some suspicions about Derek before or
that she believes corruption is a common enough problem among
law enforcement officials. When she asks, Michael tells her that
“something was going on,” which shows that he trusts her and
doesn’t believe she helped Derek do anything corrupt.
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Allie leaves. Michael realizes that Beth followed them inside
and tells her to go. She does, gratefully. She’s horrified that
Derek’s dead, likely stabbed to death by the person who killed
the others. Then, suddenly terrified that the killer is still inside
with her father, Beth runs back shouting for him. He reassures
her that no one else is there; Derek likely died the night before.
Michael and Beth walk outside, and Michael notes that the
house wasn’t forcibly opened until Michael burst through the
door. He says, “The only way in was—” and cuts himself off.
When Beth asks him what he’s thinking, he says he’s not sure
yet. He talks to Rachel on the phone and then says that he and
Beth need to go visit someone.
CHAPTER 16. BETH: THE STORY
As Michael drives to the hospital, Beth asks whether he
believes that Catching can shed light on Derek’s murder.
Rather than answer, Michael confronts Beth with his suspicion
that Catching can hear her. When Beth admits it, Michael asks
why she kept it a secret. She says that she didn’t want to tell
him because Catching believes that Beth should “move on.”
Michael, surprised, asks whether there is a place she could go.
After some delay, she admits that there’s a place full of colors
and her mom is there—but she hurries to say that she plans to
stay with Michael.
Michael asks whether Beth wouldn’t prefer to go to a better
place with her mom. When Beth can’t make herself lie, Michael
realizes that Beth is delaying because of him and insists that
he’ll be fine. Beth explodes, saying that he’s obviously not fine.
When he makes a pained face, she says she’s going to talk to
Catching about the murders. He tries to talk to her more about
the other place, but she phases through the car and into the
hospital. In Catching’s room, she blurts that her dad knows they
can talk and that she already discussed moving on with him, so
Catching doesn’t need to say anything about it.
Michael enters Catching’s hospital room and insists that he and
Beth need to talk. Beth is denying it when Catching tells them
both that they need to talk about something else. Beth looks at
Catching closely and notices she seems more defined and
colorful somehow. Catching tells them she’s going to tell them
the rest of her story. She says that stories helped her survive
“the beneath-place,” but she’s not sure what hers will do to Beth
and Michael.
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Beth’s frantic worry for Michael illustrates how much she cares
about him despite the tension and resentment his obsessive grief
has introduced into their relationship. Michael’s abortive narrative
about how the murderer must have entered the house, “The only
way in was—”, suggests that he is trying to invent a plausible story
about Derek’s murder but isn’t yet confident enough in it to tell
Beth.
Michael hasn’t been intentionally using his grief to prevent Beth
from moving on to the afterlife: he assumed she was haunting him
because she had no other choice. Beth’s hesitation before telling
him about the afterlife of bright colors (symbolizing positive
emotion), where her mom is waiting for her suggests that she
expects Michael will be upset with her for staying frozen in the
physical world solely for his benefit.
While readers may have blamed Michael for his obsessive grief,
which has made Beth feel obligated to stay with him, this scene
makes clear that Michael wants what’s best for Beth and would
never consciously keep her from growing, changing, and moving on.
Beth feels obligated to Michael because she recognizes how much
pain he's in—something he can’t fully control. This dynamic
illustrates how grief and trauma can negatively impact not only the
people directly suffering from them but the people around them as
well.
The greater intensity of Catching’s colors, which symbolize positive
emotions and psychological health, suggests that telling the story of
her captivity and abuse to Michael and Beth is helping her.
Immediately afterward, she suggests that stories can be tools for
survival in traumatic contexts such as “the beneath-place.” This
claim adds to the significance that the novel places on stories, which
have already been represented as useful heuristics for discovering
and communicating the truth.
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CHAPTER 17. CATCHING: THE TWO
Catching knows that people can escape the present by
contemplating the future or the past, but at times the present is
too horrible to ignore. First and Second carry her to the Feed’s
room and put her on the table. She notices that something
about the Feed looks different, but she isn’t sure what. The
Feed has to dig deep in her body to find a color to eat, because
so many have been eaten already. Catching passes out from the
pain. When she regains consciousness, she’s in her own room
and her entire arm has turned gray.
Crow asks Catching why she struggles rather than becoming a
dead girl. Catching considers whether emotional death would
be a release, but she rejects the possibility. Instead, she recites
the words describing Catching women, from “Granny” to
“Mum” to herself. Crow joins in and adds her own relationship
words, including her grandmother, parents, friend, and
Catching herself. Eventually, Catching falls asleep. When she
wakes, the Fetchers bring her food. After eating, she realizes
they’ve drugged her again. She’s shocked: they never bring her
to the Feed again so quickly. Then she realizes that the Feed
who just assaulted her had eyes like “chips of brown stone,” not
“mirrors”—which means there are two Feeds.
CHAPTER 18. CATCHING: THE DREAM
Catching has no idea how much time has passed, but more and
more of her is becoming gray. One day, Crow cries over
Catching’s grayness. Catching makes Crow say the relationship
words with her. Eventually, Catching falls asleep and dreams
that she’s on a green hill covered in colorful wildflowers, where
she encounters a group of girls. The girls tell Catching that
Crow is engaged in the wrong struggle: “You can’t fight feeling
with not-feeling!” Catching realizes that these are the dead
girls; they tell her that she’s almost dead too. When Catching
wonders whether death would be so bad, a violent wind lifts
her into the sky. A girl below calls out that Catching must name
what she’s fighting to defeat it with its “opposite.”
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When Catching thinks about traveling mentally away from the
present to the future or the past, she emphasizes that a person’s
subjective, personal sense of time is sometimes more powerful than
clock-time. Yet when she is suffering another one of the Feed’s
assaults, she can’t escape in that way. Her progressive loss of color
symbolizes how the Feed’s violent predation is stealing all her
positive emotions and undermining her psychological strength.
Catching refuses to become emotionally dead as a response to the
Feed’s predation. Her focus on reciting her relationship-words
emphasizes that loving relationships can be a source of strength in
traumatic situations. When Crow riffs on Catching’s relationship
names, adding her own, it shows that Catching’s friendship is
changing Crow, making her want to emulate Catching’s loving
strength. Finally, Catching’s discovery that there are two Feeds
reveals that her story has two villains, not one.
Crow’s tears over Catching’s grayness reveal that she has been
emotionally affected by her friendship with Catching, despite her
self-presentation as a dead, unfeeling girl. When Catching receives
advice from the Feed’s previous victims—that “you can’t fight feeling
with not-feeling” but only with its “opposite”—the scene reveals two
things. First, the Feed’s victims are a kind of sisterhood, a band of
female friends trying to protect one another against their shared
abuser. Second, emotional numbness and dissociation (“not-
feeling”) are ultimately not a helpful response to traumatic pain
(“feeling”). Instead of dissociating, Catching and Crow need to find
their pain’s “opposite”—one of the positive emotions represented by
the intense colors in Catching’s dream.
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Catching wakes up to Crow screaming her name. When
Catching covers her ears, she realizes that her arms weigh
almost nothing and she’s nearly dead. Crow calls herself stupid,
asking why she revived Catching when Catching was dying.
Catching laughs at the irony of Crow, who wants Catching to
become a dead girl, saving Catching’s life. Then she notices that
a few strands of Crow’s hair have turned black. Catching,
overjoyed, says aloud that colors can come back after they’ve
been stolen.
Crow, terrified of feeling emotions, starts plucking out the
black strands of her hair. When Catching tries to stop her,
Crow shouts that Catching and “words” caused this to happen.
She slashes Catching’s arm with her nails, drawing blood. Crow
is shocked: she thought she couldn’t hurt anyone or affect
anything, any more than she could feel. Catching tells her that
she’s becoming more powerful, having regained one of her
colors. Crow goggles at her hands, “as if she’s only just realized
what hands can do.”
Catching asks whether she’s regained any color. When Crow
says no, Catching remembers when Crow told her that each
person has their own gray. She wonders whether that means
each person has “their own way to get colours back.” Recalling
the dead girl in her dream who told her to name what she was
fighting, Catching wonders whether the gray has another
name. She stares at her arm where the gray first took hold and
names what she was feeling when it happened: “despair.”
Immediately, the gray gets paler. Catching thinks that the
opposite of despair is “hope,” but the part of her that used to
hope has been damaged.
Catching begins to cry. Then, suddenly, her great-great-
grandmother’s name, Trudy Catching, pops into her head. She
remembers her mother telling her how white colonization stole
Trudy Catching’s agency, but Trudy still preserved her sense of
self, drawing resilience from her family and community.
Internally, Catching recites the names of the Catching women,
from Trudy to herself. Hope grows inside her, becoming a fire
that burns the gray fingermarks off her arm. She can see a “blue
vein” through her skin.
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A wind carried Catching out of her dream; since Crow woke her up
in the real world, readers can infer that the dream-wind represented
Crow’s screaming. Crow no longer wants Catching to die—though
she believes that dying is the only way for Catching to escape the
pain of the Feed’s predation. Since intense colors like black
symbolize positive emotion in the novel, whereas gray represents
grief, trauma, and emotional numbness, the black strands in Crow’s
hair suggest that her friendship with Catching has given her back
some emotional capacity after violent abuse numbed and
“deadened” her.
When Crow claims that Catching and “words” have brought her
colors back, it suggests that not only Catching’s friendship but also
Crow’s memories of loved ones (whose relationship words she has
been reciting with Catching) are helping her heal from her
traumatized emotional deadness. Her new ability to affect the
physical world after regaining her colors hints that emotions are
ultimately a source of strength, not a weakness. Since Beth, a ghost,
can only influence the physical world when she’s feeling strong
emotions, this scene is another hint that Crow is a literal ghost.
Gray symbolizes trauma and emotional numbness, while intense
colors symbolize positive emotions and psychological health. In that
context, Catching’s speculation that everyone has “their own way to
get their colours back” means that everyone heals from trauma,
grief, and so on in their own way: there’s no one-size-fits-all healing
process. In Catching’s case, she needs hope to heal, but she believes
that the abuse she has suffered has compromised her ability to
hope.
Again, the novel parallels the Feed’s predation on girls to white
colonial attacks on Aboriginal ways of life, suggesting that both are
unjust abuses of power that traumatize their victims. Despite
Aboriginal woman Trudy Catching’s lack of power in a culture
controlled by white colonists, she maintained her identity through
her connections with her loved ones—a detail that emphasizes the
importance of community to surviving trauma. Trudy’s example of
resilience gives Catching enough hope to remove the gray on her
arm that represents “despair.”
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Crow, examining Catching’s wrist and her own hair, says aloud
that Catching isn’t dead and she herself isn’t gray. Then she
asks, “No one comes?” Catching understands: Crow used to
believe that girls needed to be “dead inside” to cope with the
Feed taking their colors, that grayness was permanent, and that
no one would arrive to fight the Feed. Now Crow knows that
the girls don’t need to be dead inside and grayness isn’t
permanent, which makes her wonder whether someone will
fight the Feed. Catching says that she and Crow will reverse
their gray and “stop the Feed.”
CHAPTER 19. CATCHING: THE CATCHING
In the shadows, Crow repeats the false things she used to
believe about her own powerlessness—and laughs at them.
Catching likes Crow’s method of removing grayness, but hers
is different: she must identify the feeling her gray represents
and fight it. She finds a gray that represents fear, recalls a time
she stood up to a school bully, and erases the gray with her
remembered courage. Then she pictures herself and Crow in
the future, free on a beach, and uses that imagined happiness
to erase a gray piece of misery. Catching doesn’t know how long
this process takes; she measures it not by clock-time but by
“the distance between who we are and who we’re turning into.”
CHAPTER 20. CATCHING: THE ESCAPE
When the Fetchers enter Catching’s room, Crow—with black
hair, brown skin, and brown eyes—knocks First over and breaks
Second’s mask, revealing that he has no face. Catching pulls
First’s mask off and breaks it as the faceless void beneath
screams for his mask’s return. Then the girls run out of the
room and face down the Feed with “mirror-eyes,” who’s
approaching down the hall. Though the last gray part of
Catching wants to flee, she stares at the Feed instead and
names the gray: “shame.” She tells him that the gray shame
belongs to him, while her colors belong to her, and that she
feels proud of “surviving” him. Her last piece of gray vanishes.
Crow bursts into a song about the Feed’s death, and the Feed
runs away. When Crow and Catching corner him at the end of a
tunnel, he hits the roof, wounding himself but creating a hole.
When he climbs through the hole, the girls follow him into the
aboveground world. Catching is stunned by the nature around
her. Crow declares herself and Catching “rainbow girls” who
will color and be colored by the world.
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Crow told herself stories about the necessity of numbness and
death to deal with her traumatic reality. Catching’s friendship and
her example of resilience have revealed to Crow that the stories she
told herself were false. Realizing the truth—that someone can “stop
the Feed”—gives Catching and Crow the courage to fight the Feed
themselves.
Crow and Catching have very different methods of regaining their
colors from the grayness, which symbolizes the emotional harm that
traumatic violence has done to them. The difference between the
two girls emphasizes again that healing from trauma is not a one-
size-fits-all process: everyone heals differently. When Catching says
that she measures time by “the distance between who we are and
who we’re turning into,” she asserts that personal growth is a truer
measure of time for a person than clock-time is.
Catching and Crow work together to escape the Fetchers, showing
the strength and ability to collaborate that their friendship has
given them. The Fetchers’ facelessness and Catching’s claim that
the grayness belongs to the Feed both imply that abusers are the
ones who are truly numb, dead inside, and incapable of change, not
their victims. By naming the last gray that she erases “shame,”
Catching asserts that the Feed should be ashamed of victimizing
her—but she will no longer be ashamed of being victimized. Instead,
she feels pride at “surviving.”
When Crow and Catching escape, color has returned to the external
world. As color symbolizes positive emotions and psychological
health, the return of color symbolizes that Crow and Catching’s
escape is the final step in overcoming their violent trauma. Crow’s
claim that she and Catching will become “rainbow girls” in dialogue
with the colorful world means that the full spectrum of positive
emotions is open to the girls again, as a result of their resilience and
strong friendship.
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Catching sees a far-off light. When she and Crow approach it,
they discover a locked cage containing colorful birds and the
Feed, grinning. When the birds yell for help, Crow’s hair moves,
forming wings and beating to create a wind that breaks the
cage door. The birds fly free. As Catching and Crow enter the
cage and circle the Feed, he transforms from a monster into a
nervous man who no longer has mirrors for eyes because he’s
lost his glasses.
Catching realizes that she’s confronting the Feed not on her
own behalf—not anymore—but because someone must end his
behavior. She tells him that he doesn’t matter to his victims,
though he wants to; in the future, he’ll just be “a bad man we
once knew,” and they’ll forget about him. Abruptly, “the world
explodes.”
CHAPTER 21. BETH: THE END
When Catching finishes, Beth realizes that the story has taken
all day and all night—it’s morning. Beth feels as though the
story has altered her worldview, and Michael looks as bad as he
did after Beth died. When he tells Catching how he’s sorry, she
tells him again that he was “too late” to help and that “it” is
about 100 steps “west.” Beth asks what that means, but neither
Catching nor Michael explains.
Michael stands up, looking “hard” and “clear”—the way he did
before Beth died, the way he will when he’s healed from his
grief. When Michael tells Beth that they need to leave, Beth
looks to Catching. Catching, with unexpected “lightness,” smiles
and tells Beth that they’ll see each other again and that Beth
will understand eventually. In the car, Michael calls Allie and
asks her to come to the children’s home. Then he stops the car
and tells Beth that soon he’s going to travel somewhere that he
doesn’t want Beth entering. He doesn’t restart the car until
Beth promises that she won’t follow him in.
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Since the Feed eats colors, the caged birds’ colorfulness suggests
that they represent other potential victims. In Catching’s dream, the
wind seemed to represent Crow, while in this scene, Crow creates
wind with her winglike hair—which hints that Crow may be
connected to the other mysterious gusts of wind earlier in the book.
The transformation of the mirror-eyed Feed into a human man who
needs glasses shows that Catching’s story has likely always been an
allegory. That is, the Feed abused her so monstrously that she saw
him as a monster and chose to explain what he did to her through
symbolism, rather than risk retraumatizing herself by sharing literal,
explicit details of abuse with Michael and Beth.
Catching isn’t confronting the Feed simply for her own gain because
she and Crow, mutually supporting one another, have overcome the
trauma he inflicted on them. Yet because the Feed might abuse
others, she still feels a responsibility to stop him. Before she does,
she cuts him down to size by telling him that he is not an important
character in his victims’ life stories, but only “a bad man [they] once
knew.” When “the world explodes,” it suggests that
someone—perhaps Crow—has violently destabilized the cage where
the Feed was holding the birds captive.
When Michael looks as bad after hearing Catching’s story as he did
after Beth died, it shows that he has moved past his obsessive grief
sufficiently to care about injustices unrelated to her death—a good
sign for his healing. Catching again says that Michael was “too late”
to help her; given the story she just told about defeating the Feed,
she seems to mean that he was “too late” because she and Crow
already saved themselves by working together.
Michael’s “hard,” “clear” appearance indicates that the righteous
anger at the injustices perpetrated against Catching have overcome
his grief, making him want to reengage with the world around him to
make it a better place. Catching’s “lightness” after finishing her story
illustrates that sharing one’s story with others can help lighten the
heavy burden of terrible past experiences—even if, like Catching,
someone has already overcome their trauma.
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At the home, Michael finds Allie, who has brought two
flashlights at his request. When she asks him whether he thinks
they’ll find anything new, given that a search was already
conducted, Michael asks whether Derek oversaw the first
search. When Allie says he did, Michael suggests that that
would make a difference. He walks to the burned-down house,
turns west, and begins walking, counting his steps. When he
reaches 80, the wind picks up; Beth wonders whether it comes
from Crow, the way it did in Catching’s story, but she doesn’t
see Crow anywhere.
When Michael reaches 100 steps, he stops, looks around, and
then sprints off—through trees, into a clearing, where he finds
an open hatch, half-hidden in shadows under a rock, with a
ladder leading down inside. When Allie asks what it is, Michael
suggests that apocalypse-obsessed Oscar Sholt had a bunker
constructed. Allie notices dried blood on the hatch and yells
into the bunker. When she receives no response, she tells
Michael that a wounded person might be in there and starts
climbing down the ladder. When Michael gives Beth a look, she
calls to him that she’s staying put. He nods and follows Allie.
Beth sits on a log in the clearing. After a while, she spots a pair
of glasses nearby in the clearing. Suddenly, many facts become
clear to her. She sees that the rock over the bunker looks like
“an egg lying on its side” and that the glasses are “mirror-eyes.”
She realizes that the Fetchers held Catching captive in the
bunker, the caged birds were the kids in the home, and
Alexander Sholt was one of the Feeds. She also realizes who
killed Alexander, whose body is the unidentified one found in
the burned home.
Allie climbs out of the bunker and vomits. Michael follows,
looking nauseated. They discuss what they saw: many girls
were kept captive in the bunker—and Derek’s jacket was in the
bunker too. Beth realizes that Derek must have been the
second Feed. Michael suggests to Allie that Derek and
Alexander were running the bunker, while Cavanagh and Flint
were being paid to keep quiet about it—and perhaps to supply
Derek and Alexander with victims from the children’s home.
Allie demands to know how anyone could do that for money.
Michael hypothesizes that Cavanagh and Flint had “no moral
core” and enjoyed feeling powerful as well as getting money.
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When Michael says he thinks it makes a difference that Derek
oversaw the first search, he is implying that Derek was a corrupt
enough police officer to hide evidence of Catching’s kidnapping,
captivity, and abuse. Here, Beth makes explicit the possible link
between mysterious gusts of wind in the real world and the wind
Crow summoned in Catching’s story. If real, this link suggests that
some fantastical parts of Catching’s story were literally true, even if
the Feeds were allegories of human monstrousness.
Allie is willing to climb into a blood-spattered apocalypse bunker
with only Michael for backup because someone inside might be
hurt. Her bravery and concern for others makes clear that some
police officers are moral and well-intentioned people, even as
others—such as Derek—abuse the power that the legal system gives
them.
With a little new evidence, Beth can decode Catching’s allegory and
match real-world objects to Catching’s fantastical descriptions:
since Catching described the tunnels as near a rock like “an egg lying
on its side” in the first segment of her story, Beth can identify the
bunker as the tunnels’ real-world correlate. She realizes that
bespectacled Alexander was the Feed with “mirror-eyes” in the same
way. The identification of the caged birds with the kids in the
children’s home suggests that Alexander may have funded a
government-approved facility for foster children to gain access to a
larger victim pool.
Derek was the second Feed—not simply a corrupt local officer who
showed favoritism to his rich friend from high school, but someone
who used his status as a police officer to hide his own violent crimes
against girls. Michael’s further speculations about the bunker
illuminate other aspects of Catching’s allegorical story: Cavanagh
and Flint were monsters called “Fetchers” because they fetched
victims for Alexander and Derek from the home. The Fetchers’
facelessness beneath their humanoid masks represented their lack
of “moral core.”
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When Allie says that they should immediately put out a warrant
for Alexander’s arrest, Michael says that he believes Alexander
is the corpse that was found in the children’s home. Gently, he
tells Allie that Alexander and Derek had probably been
committing these crimes since high school: if police officers
search the area, they will probably find many dead victims,
including the initial victim—whom Michael believes was killed
20 years ago. Allie, realizing what Michael means, vehemently
insists that Sarah is alive and that Allie will find her. Michael
apologizes softly and says that they’re going to find Sarah’s
body.
Allie staggers and sits on a log, shrinking into herself. She says
that they need to bring in outside police to search the area, not
local police “too dumb to see what their boss really is.” When
Michael starts speaking, Allie interrupts, refusing comfort: she
believes she should have known about Derek because she was
Sarah’s friend and a police officer. Michael snaps back that she
should act like a police officer, then: they need to figure out
whether other kids went missing from the home and whether
anyone else covered up the crimes—for example, Gerry Bell or
Charles Sholt. Allie is stunned by the possibility that Gerry
intentionally botched the investigation into Sarah’s
disappearance.
Allie wonders whether Derek was involved with Cavanagh and
Flint’s deaths, though Derek’s subsequent murder is confusing.
Michael says that the same weapon likely killed all three. He
spins a hypothesis: Alexander and Derek fight, Derek kills
Alexander, and an accidental fire burns the house down,
causing confusion. Somehow, Derek convinces Charles Sholt to
help cover up Alexander’s death. Then Derek kills Cavanagh
and Flint because, without Alexander’s money to buy their
silence, he fears what they’ll say. Finally, Charles Sholt becomes
suspicious about Alexander’s death and pays someone to kill
Derek with the same murder weapon. Beth, eavesdropping,
knows that Michael is spinning a false story to hide the
truth—but Allie seems to believe it.
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Here Michael seems to assume that the “explosion” at the end of
Catching’s story represented not only the fire at the children’s home
but Catching and Crow’s final vengeance against Alexander. His
assumption that all the disturbing events in the town are
connected—that Sarah Blue was Alexander and Derek’s initial
victim—shows that he is connecting correlated events the way a
detective would, not the way a scientist would, to arrive at what he
believes to be the truth. Allie’s kneejerk refusal to believe that Sarah
is dead shows both the strength of their childhood friendship and
Allie’s own repressed grief.
Allie now knows what fellow police officer and boss Derek “really
is”—that is, a serial killer who abused his legal authority to hide his
own crimes. Yet this revelation doesn’t alter her positive opinion of
police officers: she assumes that other police officers won’t be
“dumb,” criticizes herself for failing to notice Derek’s evil despite
being an officer herself and is shocked at the possibility that retired
police chief Gerry Bell could have been corrupt. When Michael tells
Allie to act like an officer, he too is expressing an implicitly positive
view of police officers. Thus, while the novel may view Australia’s
government, laws, and police with some suspicion, the novel’s two
good-guy police officer characters, Allie and Michael, don’t see the
existence of individual corrupt, power-abusing police officers as a
reason to distrust law enforcement as an institution or an ideal.
Meanwhile, Allie’s claim that she should have known what
happened to Sarah because they were friends suggests that she has
an almost magical view of the power of her and Sarah’s friendship.
Throughout the novel, Michael has told hypothetical stories about
the case, based on incomplete available evidence, as a way of
testing which stories could be true. Thus, normally, detective
storytelling in the novel brings characters a little closer to the truth.
In this scene, however, Michael spins a convincing story from the
facts that Allie knows to fool her—either because he doesn’t want to
implicate Catching and Crow in Alexander’s murder or because he
thinks Allie won’t believe the truth. This scene is a reminder that
even if many stories help people see the truth, some stories are false
or misleading.
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Michael tells Allie that he may have the story wrong, but
regardless, they’ll have to work hard to get justice for Derek
and Alexander’s victims. He asks whether she can do that. Allie,
with determination, says she can. Beth realizes that Allie will
stay resilient so long as she can pursue justice for others.
Michael says he’ll call his fellow police officers from the city. He
asks Allie to go wait for them at the home, so that she can lead
them to the bunker when they arrive. As Allie leaves, the wind
starts playing with her hair—and she seems to find it
comforting.
Michael asks Beth whether she has comprehended the whole
situation. When Beth says yes, he gives her a gentle look and
tells her that Catching is dead. Beth protests that Catching is a
patient in the hospital. Yet when Michael asks Beth whether
she remembers meeting Catching, Beth recalls that she saw
another girl she thought was the witness right before Catching
spoke to them. She asks whether Michael thinks the first girl
was the witness. Michael nods, saying that he thinks the first
girl really did escape rehab, while Catching really did get caught
in a storm with her mom like she said. Cavanagh and Flint
probably found Catching wandering away from the accident,
and Derek hid evidence of the crash.
Beth protests that Michael can see Catching. Michael points
out that he can see Beth too. Beth acknowledges that it may be
possible for Michael to see ghosts besides hers—but Catching’s
story makes Beth believe that Catching survived, though she
isn’t sure why. Michael says that he couldn’t save Catching
because he and Beth arrived after “it was all over [. . .] at the
end.” This statement doesn’t sit right with Beth. Suddenly, a
voice speaks from behind her, saying that while Beth and
Michael are at the end, the beginning “hasn’t happened yet.”
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Allie, grieving for Sarah, derives strength from the responsibility she
feels to all Derek and Alexander’s victims—which suggests that
committing to others’ well-being and pursuing justice can be
psychologically healthy and healing. Wind in the novel is associated
with Crow; when the wind comforts Allie, it implies that Crow—who
claimed to have been in the bunker since the Feeds began preying
on girls—may be the ghost of the initial victim, Allie’s friend Sarah.
Michael is still working to decode Catching’s allegorical story. He
interprets Catching’s initial meeting with the Fetchers as a
representation of an accidental encounter with Cavanagh and Flint,
which seems very likely to be correct. Yet his assumption that
Catching died is an odd one, as Catching didn’t seem to narrate an
allegorical account of her own death as part of her fantastical story.
Catching’s story seemed to make fairly clear that Michael was “too
late” to save her and Crow because they had already saved
themselves—yet Michael is still interpreting the phrase “too late” to
mean that Catching was murdered. His stubbornly pessimistic
interpretation suggests that while he is healing from his grief, his
guilt over failing to save Beth still influences how he understands
Catching’s story. His claim that they came “at the end” implies that
he views time and stories as linear, progressing inexorably from
beginning to end. By contrast, the sudden voice’s claim that the end
has come but the beginning “hasn’t happened yet” suggests that
stories might be cyclical and multiple—lives contain many ends and
beginnings, not just one each, and a new beginning is about to
arrive.
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CHAPTER 22. BETH: THE BEGINNING
Beth turns and sees Catching, wearing a robelike version of her
green sweater and carrying a crow—which Beth now realizes is
Sarah Blue—on her shoulder. Startled by Catching’s sudden
apparition, Beth asks whether Catching is a ghost. Catching
responds evasively—and Beth, noticing this, starts trying to
figure out what really happened to Catching. When Catching
asks whether Beth understands the purpose of the story now,
Beth thinks that even Catching may not know “everything she’d
been trying to say.” Nevertheless, Beth admits that she
understands Catching was trying to model for her “how to
move on.”
Catching explains that Crow saw Beth at the home the day she
arrived in town. As Crow thought that Beth might be trapped in
this world, Catching decided to meet her and discover the
truth. Beth says she remembers the crow. When Crow flies
from Catching’s shoulder to a nearby tree, Michael smiles,
clearly happy that Sarah’s spirit is free. He promises Catching
that the police will hold Gerry Bell, Charles Sholt, and any other
accomplices to account—but Catching needs to leave it to the
police.
Beth and Catching exchange glances. Then Beth explains to
Michael that Catching didn’t commit the murders. Alexander’s
window broke when something pulled Cavanagh and Flint out
of it—and then dropped them onto the drain from the sky,
without touching the fence. Something got into Derek’s house
through the chimney. And the “blade with the curve” that
stabbed all of them was a beak. Utterly startled, Michael stares
at Crow. Then he apologizes to Crow for everything that
happened to her and asks her to let him, Allie, and the police
handle the case now that the Feeds and Fetchers are gone.
Beth wonders how she didn’t notice that one of the town’s
crows was larger and prettier than the others. She connects
Crow to the timely appearances of wind at various points in the
investigation. Thinking about Crow’s powers leads Beth to
think about Catching’s—and she has a realization. She says that
Catching isn’t dead: her power nurtures her friends, helping
Crow affect the world and giving Beth the ability to make
lightbulbs explode, because each Catching woman has a power,
and Catching’s is to “walk all the sides of the world.”
©2023 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com
Beth’s realization that the crow is Sarah Blue suggests both that
Crow from Catching’s story was Sarah Blue’s ghost and that the
crow Beth saw at the children’s home when the story began may
have been Crow herself. Catching’s claim that she told her story to
help Beth “move on” emphasizes both the friendship between the
two girls and the necessity of relationships to overcoming grief or
trauma. Meanwhile, Beth’s suspicion that Catching isn’t aware of
“everything she’d been trying to say” suggests that some stories can’t
be reduced to a single message or purpose.
Since the crow Beth first saw really was Crow, it seems likely that
Beth’s wave really did cause the crow to fly away. In other words,
the novel has all along been a detective story where everything is
connected, not a scientific story where correlation cannot be
assumed to prove causation. When Michael promises to pursue
Derek and Alexander’s accomplices, he is asking Catching to trust
the legal system despite a police officer, Derek, having violently
abused her—and when he asks her to leave it to the police, he is
implicitly telling a hypothetical story in which Catching murdered
Alexander, Derek, Cavanagh, and Flint.
Beth tells a better story about the murders than Michael did,
because she takes into account more of the strange evidence (e.g.
the “blade with the curve,” the locked gate and door) at the murder
scenes and thus spins a hypothetical narrative more likely to be
close to the truth. Michael quickly sees the superiority of Beth’s
story; as a result, he moves to begging Crow to trust the law
enforcement system, despite the way that police officers Gerry and
Derek Bell harmed her in the past.
Beth, extrapolating further from strange occurrences throughout
the novel, posits that Crow was nearby, helping Catching, Beth,
Michael, and Allie all along. Moreover, she realizes that Catching’s
power to “walk all sides of the world” serves to strengthen
Catching’s ghost friends, Beth and Crow. This element of Catching’s
supernatural ability represents the ability of female friends to
support and empower one another.
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When Beth demands to know how Catching’s power works,
Catching shrugs and asks how Beth once almost crossed to
“another side” full of colors. Beth realizes that Catching knows
about that incident because Crow—who was the shadow
chasing Beth—told her. Beth tells Catching that her almost-
journey is different because she’s a ghost, “not properly
anywhere.” Catching, blasé, says that she’s “properly
everywhere. It’s all the same world.” Catching announces that
she and Crow are going to travel to the side of reality full of
colors, as Catching wants to visit her mother there. She invites
Beth to come.
Beth’s first instinct is to say that she has to stay with
Michael—but, recognizing that things have changed, she
instead says she has to speak with him. Beth waits while
Michael makes phone calls to the city. When he finishes, they
walk into the trees to talk. He asks whether she’s going to the
other side, and she admits that she’s planning to travel to the
colorful place with Catching and Crow. He acknowledges that
she’s worried about him, criticizes himself for how he behaved
after her death, and says that he wants to be a father she “can
be proud of,” even if she’s gone.
Beth uses her intense emotions and Catching’s presence to
manifest in the living world—so that she can hug Michael. After
they hug, they say that they love each other and reaffirm their
father-daughter relationship. Then Michael calls Aunty Viv and
says that he’s coming to Grandpa Jim’s birthday party, which
Beth knows is his way of “choosing the opposite of grey.”
After Michael has walked away through the trees, Crow—in the
form of a human girl—and Catching approach Beth. Crow asks
whether Beth is ready. When Beth says that she is, Crow takes
Beth and Catching’s hands and tells them to run. The colorful
girls—Beth in yellow, Catching in green, and Crow in black—run
until they leap into the air, transforming into colors and joining
the other colors waiting for them, including Beth’s mom,
Catching’s mom, and Crow’s family. The three girls travel
together everywhere.
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Catching’s claim that “it’s all the same world” suggests a
metaphysical or religious view according to which living people and
dead people inhabit the same reality: they just exist in different
parts of reality, affecting reality in different ways. This view implies
that grief is more about living people’s fear of losing access to their
dead loved ones than it is about their dead loved one’s ceasing to
exist. The afterlife full of colors, which symbolize positive emotions
and psychological health, suggests that the dead’s existence is
joyous.
Here, Michael acknowledges that the way he grieved Beth was
unhealthy not only for himself but for her. That Michael’s grief was
unhealthy for Beth is clear in that it discouraged her from traveling
to an afterlife full of colors, which symbolize positive emotion and
psychological health. When Michael says that he wants her to “be
proud of” him in the afterlife, meanwhile, he's acknowledging that
they can have a loving relationship even if they aren’t physically
present to each other anymore.
Catching’s power allows Beth to hug Michael—a detail that
represents how Catching’s friendship and encouragement helped
Beth forge a healthier relationship with her father. When Beth says
that Michael is “choosing the opposite of grey” by reconnecting with
his in-laws, she suggests that Michael is beginning to combat his
grief with loving relationships the way Catching fought her “gray”
trauma with positive emotions.
The girls transform into streaks of intense color after finally
overcoming their “gray” grief and trauma, emphasizing that people
can heal from such negative experiences with the help of friends and
loved ones. Up to this point, Beth has been trapped looking exactly
as she did the day she died. Her transformation into a streak of color
highlights that she has overcome her own and Michael’s grief and
accepted the growth and change that comes with death. Finally, the
girls’ decision to travel together everywhere shows the strength and
importance of female friendship.
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To cite any of the quotes from Catching Teller Crow covered in the
HOW T
TO
O CITE Quotes section of this LitChart:
To cite this LitChart: MLA
MLA Kwaymullina, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel. Catching Teller
Crow. Penguin. 2019.
Prendergast, Finola. "Catching Teller Crow." LitCharts. LitCharts
LLC, 31 Jul 2023. Web. 31 Jul 2023. CHICA
CHICAGO
GO MANU
MANUAL
AL
CHICA
CHICAGO
GO MANU
MANUAL
AL Kwaymullina, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel. Catching Teller
Crow. London: Penguin. 2019.
Prendergast, Finola. "Catching Teller Crow." LitCharts LLC, July 31,
2023. Retrieved July 31, 2023. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/
catching-teller-crow.

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