62 pages • 2 hours read
Linked
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Michael Amorosa”
At home after school, Michael Amorosa realizes he forgot his cellphone in his locker and takes the long bike ride back to retrieve it. He is surprised to find the door to the boy’s locker room unlocked (5). He had expected to need to call the custodian, Mr. Kennedy.
After retrieving his phone, Michael turns around and is shocked to see a red swastika spray-painted on the atrium wall above a staircase. He drops his phone, cracking the screen. At that moment, Mr. Kennedy appears and asks Michael if he is responsible. Michael asks the reader rhetorically why “the only Dominican kid in the whole school” would “draw a racist symbol” (7). Mr. Kennedy calls the police.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Lincoln Rowley”
Seventh-grader Lincoln “Link” Rowley and his friends, Jordie Duros and Clayton Pouncey, are pulling a prank with their friends, Sophie Tavener and Pamela Bynes. They are depositing 80 pounds of fertilizer in the remote paleontology office of Wexford-Smythe University, a university in Massachusetts. The paleontologists are in Chokecherry to research locally discovered “dinosaur poop” that has been fossilized (8). As the boys tip the manure through a mail slot, car headlights shine on them. All the kids run away except Link, who is “literally holding the bag” (10). The woman in the car recognizes him as “George Rowley’s boy,” and he knows he is busted (11). His father has already taken him out of sports—Link’s source of popularity at school—due to previous pranks.
His father is a real estate agent with investments in town. According to Link, his father believes the paleontologists are an opportunity to make Chokecherry the next Disney. Link believes the scientists and their children, who attend his school, think they are too good for the town. His father, however, hopes an important find will make Chokecherry the “dinosaur capital of North America” (13). Link believes his father is angry not because of the prank itself but because of who the prank targeted. As they argue in the car, his father’s phone rings, and he abruptly turns the car around, saying, “There’s trouble at the school” (14).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Dana Levinson”
When Dana Levinson arrives at Chokecherry Middle School, she notices that students are looking at her, the only Jewish student at school, and whispering. She has grown used to being “the new kid” (15). Her father is one of the university’s paleontologists on the dinosaur dig, and she is used to moving, but Chokecherry is more isolated than she has previously experienced. Entering the building, she notices the custodians attempting to adjust a large tarp over the wall, but it falls down, revealing the swastika. Her classmates take out their phones and snap photos until the principal, Mr. Brademas, orders them to clear the area.
Dana’s friend Andrew Yee, whose mother is also working on the dinosaur project, walks her to her class, promising her the whole thing will blow over. In class, though, all her classmates are staring at her. An assembly is immediately called, at which Mr. Brademas announces that the swastika is a symbol of “racism and intolerance” that is “unacceptable” (20) and that he and the faculty plan to address it with a “tolerance education project” (20). Dana notes that his evident distress signals to the students that “maybe [they] should be more upset than [they] really are” (21). The wall has been repainted by lunch.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Lincoln Rowley”
Link’s father makes him clean the fertilizer from the paleontology office, but the scientists themselves are mildly amused by the prank. Any residual anger is tempered by the much bigger problem of the swastika, which Link believes will be forgotten before the tolerance education project is half done. He feels the reaction to the swastika is overblown.
In class, his teacher, Mrs. Babbitt, tapes up a sign reading “NO PLACE FOR HATE” (22). She discusses World War II, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Link has heard it all before: 11 million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps, including six million Jews. The students learn about a project that a middle school in Tennessee undertook to collect six million paper clips, which became the topic of a movie. Jordie makes a joke about it, and Sophie gushes that it made the students famous. Dana is amazed that this is Sophie’s takeaway, and Sophie is chastened; Link thinks she’s being “extra touchy.” Dana gives Link a dirty look as the class is dismissed, and Pouncey teases Link, a popular star athlete, that his “magic is over” (24). Jordie jokes that Dana will fail “tolerance education” because she doesn’t like Link, and Link guesses that Dana dislikes him because her father told her about the fertilizer prank.
At home, Link’s parents disagree about the tolerance education project. His father argues that it calls “attention to one little hiccup” that makes “the whole town look bad” (25), scaring off potential investors. His mother argues that the town looks good for taking it seriously. His mother reminds his father that the Ku Klux Klan was in their county, Shadbush County, 40 years ago. Link is surprised, as he’s never heard about this, but his father insists it is “ancient history” that does not need to be dredged up (27). Link reflects that this is why the swastika has rattled the adults: It feels “like the past [is] coming back to haunt them” (27).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Michael Amorosa”
Some suspect Michael is responsible for the swastika because he was the first to see it. He reminds his classmates, including Andrew and Dana, that he is Dominican and, at least theoretically, an object of racist attacks. Andrew adds that he could be too. The swastika is not just “anti-Jewish” but “anti-everybody” who does not “live or think the same way as the white supremacists” (28). Seventh-grade president Caroline McNutt is tired of the tolerance education unit and wants it to be over; most of the students are, too. Though they agree it was necessary, Michael and Dana also agree that they are ready for it to be over.
At the end of the three-week project, Mr. Brademas asks Michael, who is head of the art club, to create a mural-sized poster for the wall that the swastika was painted on so that it will be remembered. Mr. Brademas announces the end of the project at an assembly in the gym and then moves on to congratulate the baseball team’s championship season. He unfurls a banner in their honor, which Michael notes was professionally commissioned, unlike the free labor the art club is providing. A black swastika covering the length and width of the banner is painted over the congratulatory message. This time, the students are afraid.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Linked is narrated in the present tense and is told in alternating limited omniscient perspective, rotating between the students’ points of view. This lends a sense of immediacy to the narrative and allows the reader to see the thoughts and inner feelings of multiple characters. Later sections will also incorporate transcripts of videos produced by Adam Tok, whose online persona is ReelTok. This opening section features the points of view of three students, Michael Amoroso, Lincoln “Link” Rowley, and Dana Levinson.
Michael’s points of view bookend the section: In Chapter 1, he discovers the first swastika, and in Chapter 5, he is present for the discovery of the second. Michael seems to understand the gravity of what has transpired from the moment he sees the first swastika. Because he was present at the scene, Michael comes under suspicion, though he points out that, as a Dominican American, he belongs to an underrepresented group himself and has no motive to produce a hate symbol. The narrative suggests that he has a heightened awareness of what the swastika means and how it feels to stand out. Later in the book, the point is made that the paleontologists and their families account for most of the town’s ethnic and racial diversity.
Two chapters in this section are also narrated from Link’s point of view. In his first chapter, he expresses hostility and resentment at his father for what Link interprets as his father’s obsession with making Chokecherry famous. The limited omniscient perspective allows the narrative to build a motive for Link without explicitly making it obvious that he is the one who painted the first swastika. The revelation that Link was responsible only becomes clear in hindsight, as seemingly innocuous moments in the story gain new meaning with this information.
Link feels angry and is portrayed as ignorant of the meaning and power of the swastika, noting that he views it as “a few lines of paint” and believes it will be forgotten before the tolerance unit is over (27). He is not portrayed as openly hateful or knowingly bigoted. Late chapters reveal that he misinterpreted the swastika symbol and merely intended to express his frustrations through vandalism; once he gains understanding, he is remorseful. Korman’s characterizations overall are nuanced, illustrating that good intentions can still have bad outcomes, and vice versa. Link’s father wants to elevate his community, but the way he tries to go about this is revealed to be counterproductive and ultimately harmful. Ignoring the past enables perpetuation of the same mistakes and problems. By trying to bury the town’s shameful past, Link’s father denies Link the opportunity to learn just how close history is to him. Link only begins to comprehend the true severity of his actions when he realizes that the Holocaust touched his own family and that Jewish history is a part of his community, not just a chapter in a history book. The dynamic between Link and his father introduces two central themes that will be developed across the novel: The Importance of Collective Memory and The Complexity of Motives.
Dana is Link’s polar opposite. Dana feels like she doesn’t belong because she has only been attending the school for under a year, while the rest of the students have grown up together. Additionally, she is the only Jewish student in the school. Unlike Link, Dana has not had the privilege of forgetting her own history; instead, she is constantly aware of it, as well as the extra attention she gets for being Jewish. Once the swastika appears, Dana feels like she is under a microscope, as she is the only living, tangible link the students have to Jewish history and culture; to them, the Holocaust is just another part of the school curriculum, no more relevant to their lives than trigonometry or Shakespeare.
Dana recognizes that her classmates are not taking the swastika and its impact seriously. At the start of the tolerance unit, her classmates make tasteless jokes and show a clear lack of comprehension for the significance of the Holocaust and its lasting, worldwide impact. They have no framework for understanding the harm of the swastika because they have no lived experience of or personal connection to it. Dana’s personal understanding of the swastika thus contrasts with the group’s response. In order to fit in, the narrative suggests, Dana may feel pressured to downplay what has transpired. Though she reacts to Sophie’s tasteless comment about the memorial project in Tennessee, she does not press the issue. She is also shown as tired, by Chapter 5; though the chapter is not told from her perspective, it is clear that she is uncomfortable with the massive attention garnered by the tolerance unit. Dana already disliked standing out so much, and the tolerance unit has only put her under the spotlight even more. Additionally, Dana is young and more focused on her immediate, personal circumstances; though she understands the importance of the tolerance unit better than her peers, she is still more concerned with her own struggles within the school, and even she states that the school’s response to the swastika is unnecessarily large.
However, despite the students’ overall disinterest, the tolerance unit does its job of educating the students, helping them understand that the swastika stands for hatred and bigotry. When they see the second swastika, they realize that it is “[s]omething to be afraid of” (33). The first swastika could be brushed off by the student body; the second is a clear threat, signaling to everyone in the school—and the town—that something must be done. This introduces the third theme, The Power of Individual and Community Action, which is explored in the next chapters.
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