52 pages • 1 hour read
A. M. ShineThe Watchers
A. M. ShineFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “December”
Prologue Summary: “John”
Content Warning: This section discusses murder and death, captivity, and torture. It also mentions domestic abuse and alcohol addiction.
At daybreak, John runs away from a prison into the huge surrounding forest. He has explored the area extensively and is trying to save his wife, Ciara, who is still in prison. He thinks about their lives before they were imprisoned, especially their last breakfast before they took a drive into the forest. As John becomes lost, he motivates himself to keep going by thinking about how Ciara is “wilting” in prison (8). He also thinks about the one who told them the rules of the prison (Madeline), although he does not mention her by name. When night falls, he hears the watchers shrieking and wishes that he could enjoy Christmas with Ciara. The watchers attack him.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Mina”
Mina drives into the forest. She is in the process of transporting a parrot from Galway, Ireland, to Connemara, on behalf of Peter, a bartender at her local pub. He offered to pay her to take the bird, a golden conure, to his friend Tim. Mina is an artist who watches people and draws them. One of the people in her neighborhood that she repeatedly sketches is a tall, unexpressive woman whom she has dubbed “the android” (16). Mina drew herself once in the same sketchbook that she uses to sketch the faces of others, and she carries this sketchbook with her now. As she drives into the forest, she listens to a voicemail from her sister, Jennifer, who condemns her lifestyle as an artist and declares that Mina would have disappointed their late mother. Shortly after this, the car breaks down, and Mina’s phone dies. Mina smokes a cigarette and plans to sleep in the car overnight; she will try to find help after the sun rises. As she hears shrieking, she locks the car doors.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
In the morning, Mina feeds the bird and reflects on the fact that trees are uncommon in Connemara. After drinking some water, she gathers up her sketchbook, her tobacco, and other essentials and then starts to walk through the forest, looking for help. The forest is dark and quiet, and Mina is startled when the parrot suddenly chirps. After walking for a long time, she finds a red glove and sees a light. When she gets closer, she sees that the light is coming from inside a house. The parrot chirps again, and the silhouette of a woman (later revealed to be Madeline) appears in the doorway. Madeline tells Mina to run inside, and Mina does. Madeline then locks a number of locks on the door. Mina notices that Madeline is tall and is mostly covered by a large shawl. Suddenly, Mina hears the same shrieking that she heard the night before. Madeline tells Mina to hurry because the light is already on.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Madeline leads Mina into a second room and locks its doors. One wall of the room is a giant mirror, and there is another person in the room named Daniel. They all introduce themselves, and Madeline tells Mina the rules. She explains that for the entirety of each night, while the light is on, the humans must remain visible to “the watchers” on the other side of the mirror. Mina questions the existence of the watchers, and Madeline encourages her to approach the mirror. Mina gets very close to the glass. A watcher shrieks from the other side of the glass, and she jumps back.
When another prisoner, Ciara, wakes up and emerges from a pile of blankets, Mina wants to draw her. Ciara is excited to see Mina’s parrot, but Madeline threatens to cook it for dinner. Mina forbids Madeline from hurting the bird. Madeline realizes that she left the group’s water bottle outside, so Mina gives her the water bottle from her bag. They eat some berries for dinner, huddling around a large piece of deadwood, and Madeline complains that Daniel did not manage to catch anything in the bird traps. Madeline suggests that Mina sleep in the bed that Ciara absented.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Madeline”
Their prison has two rooms: the room with the giant mirror and the living room, which has a fireplace and open windows. The mirror turns into glass when the sun rises and the light goes off. Above the fireplace, the words “Stay in the light” are written on the wall (56). Madeline calls their prison “the coop.” In the morning, she sends Daniel outside to check the traps. Madeline reflects that Ciara has become a liability since her husband, John, went missing, as she has fallen into depression and sleeps often. Before John left, Ciara was bubbly and shared stories about their holidays. Madeline goes to get water. She carries all the keys to the coop and would have locked Mina out if the woman had been slightly slower to reach the door.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Daniel”
Daniel gets up later than Madeline, and she shows him that the watchers took the water that she left outside. Madeline berates him for not catching anything in the traps and suggests that Ciara take over the job. Madeline reminds Daniel of his father, who abused him. Daniel also feels that Ciara is “the sister he never had” (65), and he thinks that Mina is beautiful. Daniel fears being dragged into the watchers’ underground tunnels, through the burrows that reach to the surface. However, after telling Ciara that Madeline is upset with her, he heads out to check the traps as requested.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Mina”
Ciara leaves to get water and forage for berries, so Mina is alone when she wakes up and goes into the living room. Madeline comes in, and they talk about the inscription above the fireplace. Madeline expresses the hope that Mina will be more useful than Daniel and Ciara. Madeline has been in the coop for over two years. She asks if anyone will miss Mina, who reveals that she is estranged from her cruel sister, Jennifer, and from her father, who has an alcohol addiction. Mina only has her friends at the pub and doesn’t feel that they will go looking for her because she often disappears from the pub for a while. When Ciara returns, Madeline tells her to get wood for the fire. They plan to cook birds over the fire when Daniel gets home. Mina reflects on her own messy home and its art studio. After Ciara leaves, Madeline says that she preferred the way the coop was before the others came.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Daniel”
Daniel empties and resets the traps. He cooks three birds over the fire and explains that because birds seem to avoid flying over the forest, the traps are set high in the trees. Madeline thinks that Daniel should have caught more than three birds, and Daniel feels that he disappoints Madeline, just as he used to disappoint his father. Ciara takes a nap while he cooks, and Madeline tells Mina to help Daniel cook before heading off on her own.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Mina”
Mina watches Daniel cook, reflecting that although she tried to imitate her mother’s recipes, they never tasted right. When the sun sets, the glass turns into a mirror, the light turns on, and Madeline locks the door. After Daniel wakes Ciara up, they all eat. Ciara and Mina talk about Christmas, and then Mina suggests that they play cards after dinner. She has a pack of cards in her bag. In the past, she partially supported herself on her winnings from her local casino. Mina is good at figuring out people’s tells during poker. She explains how to play, and they use pieces of paper from her sketchbook as poker chips. During the game, they hear a human scream outside, and Ciara thinks that it is her husband, John.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Madeline and Ciara argue about whether to open the door. Ciara believes that John is outside, but Madeline refuses to unlock the door because she believes that the watchers are using John in order to toy with them. Daniel and Mina side with Madeline, and they leave the door locked. Ciara cries and hides in her bed. Daniel assures her that they will find John in the morning. Mina asks why Madeline thinks that the watchers are using John, and Madeline claims not to know. Mina knows that she is lying but does not challenge her.
Prologue-Part 1 Analysis
In The Watchers, A. M. Shine primarily focuses on the perspective of the protagonist, Mina, but also includes the perspectives of the other main characters—Ciara, Daniel, and Madeline. These strategic shifts in narrative structure are indicated by chapter titles named after characters, while the untitled chapters—the default—are told from Mina’s perspective. These interwoven third-person limited narratives offer a multiplicity of thoughts, rendering the static location of “the coop” more dynamic. On a broader level, the two settings of Galway and Connemara are established as polar opposites. Mina’s home, Galway—a small city—represents the safe and familiar; it is welcoming and well populated with friendly people. By contrast, the lonely forest in Connemara is largely unmapped, and Mina labels the rest of Connemara a “leafless misery” (29). There are only a few people in this location, and within the fastness of the wilds, Mina’s prison, the coop, sports an unfriendly mixture of concrete and glass that clashes with the natural elements of the forest and the treacherous nocturnal “watchers”—also known as fairies or changelings.
By mentioning Mina’s “baseline” of innate artistic ability and her eagerness to work on new pieces of art, Shine sets the stage for a later exploration of The Impact of Trauma on Creativity. In the first section, “December,” Mina has the eye of an artist. She is a careful observer who often picks out interesting people from the crowd and sketches their faces. As the narrative states, “Mina had spent so much time studying people’s faces that no detail—however slight—escaped her” (71), and this attribute foreshadows the insights that she will later gain about the identities of the day-walking watchers who hide in plain sight. Notably, she is attentive to the nuances of various expressions, and she even labels one of her artistic subjects “the android” because of the woman’s marked lack of expression. The presence of the android also foreshadows the later revelation that there are watchers who can walk in the daylight. Likewise, as Mina brings her artist’s eye into the coop, her observations will accumulate until she finally figures out (much later in the novel) that Madeline’s similar lack of expression is due to her hidden status as a watcher that can walk during the day.
For the moment, however, Mina believes that all four of the captives in the coop are equally human and equally trapped. Thus, caught as they are in a shared predicament, all the characters find themselves Gaining Strength From Found Family. Because they are forced to live together in the coop, they inevitably become a “dysfunctional family, bound not by blood, but by the want to survive” (51). While Mina has never bonded with her biological sister, she and Ciara soon gain a sisterly bond through their shared trauma. This dynamic is further reinforced by the fact that even before Mina arrived in the coop, Daniel thought of Ciara as “the big sister he never had” (65). Ciara is therefore the emotional heart of this peculiar found family. While they are imprisoned together, Mina frequently compares the confines of the coop with her home in Galway, reflecting that her messy apartment is a real home “in all its chaotic glory” (74). However, her long imprisonment compels her to start thinking of the coop as her home, and this subtle but inexorable mental shift disturbs her with its broader implications for her mental well-being.
As the narrative gradually reveals the dangers represented by the lurking watchers, Shine invokes the recurring motifs of mirrors and doppelgängers, which manifest in many different forms. For example, the coop’s mirror shares philosophical similarities with Mina’s artistic representations, for both present the viewers with external depictions of their physical selves. Of the two, however, the mirror inflicts more harmful effects. One wall of the coop is a window during the day and a mirror at night, and because the prisoners are constantly exposed to their own reflections, they begin to experience an acute sense of dissociation from themselves. Daniel has “lost so many hours staring at his own reflection that the version of him trapped in the mirror [has] become somebody else” (62). In this example, the double in the mirror essentially becomes a separate entity from the person looking into the mirror, and this dynamic stands as an eerie representation of what the watchers beyond the glass are intent on achieving themselves.
As the four prisoners struggle to endure the slow psychological ravages of their predicament, Madeline constantly criticizes Daniel and orders him and the others around, and this problematic dynamic introduces The Tension Between Caution and Compassion. Within the context of the coop, survival is based on following the rules precisely, and Madeline’s attentiveness to this necessity renders her outwardly heartless and unsympathetic to her fellow prisoners. As she asserts, “You do not survive here because you are friendly, idiotic, and naive. You survive if you are strict and abide by the rules” (71). Her rigidity and cold pragmatism overpower any vestiges of kindness or compassion, as demonstrated at the end of Part 1, when she refuses to allow the doppelgänger of Ciara’s husband, John, to enter the coop. This incident causes a disruption among the members of the found family within the prison, but Madeline’s adherence to the rules saves the group’s lives in this particular instance.
Finally, Shine introduces the symbolism of birds and compasses. Mina first ventures into the forest because she is delivering a golden conure, and the caged bird holds many symbolic similarities to Mina and the others who find themselves imprisoned in the coop. On another level, Mina’s kind treatment of the parrot can be contrasted with the cruel mistreatment that the watchers inflict upon the humans. Just as the bird imagery highlights many aspects of the group’s captivity, the circular nature of the compass is mirrored by the burrows that surround the coop—one in each direction. These elements will persist as the novel unfolds, taking on new meanings amid the group’s impossible circumstances.
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