55 pages • 1-hour read
Race to the Sun
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Chapters 28-34Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “The Rainbow Road”
Spider Woman wakes the children before dawn the next day, urging an early start so that the Diyin Dine’é will see them and open the road. Davery fears that the Holy People will refuse them access, which Spider Woman deems possible but unlikely. She keeps Mr. Yazzie so that he can rest a little longer, promising to send him along to meet the children later. They follow Spider Woman through the dreary pre-dawn. When Mac grumbles about the rain, Spider Woman reminds them that “water in the desert is a blessing” (194).
At the start of the Rainbow Road, Spider Woman cautions them to “stay on the path” and reassures them that monsters cannot harm them on the Rainbow Road (195). She advises that the cart woman’s song is a kind of map, one that shows them “not where to go, but what to wonder” (195). She disappears without clarifying.
They pause to puzzle over the verses, which still don’t make sense to them. They realize that the drying rain is causing the Rainbow Road to vanish, and they know they must hurry. Nizhoni runs, so focused on keeping track of the disappearing rainbow that she tumbles off a cliff.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Rock Concert”
The cliff isn’t sheer, so Nizhoni slides down it without serious injury. They think that the road has disappeared until Davery spots where it continues, on the far side of a gorge. As they wonder about how to reach the path again without getting lost, Mac hears a strange sound. Davery realizes that they can hear the talking rocks from the cart woman’s song. Suddenly, Mr. Yazzie appears, beckoning them forward into a rock corridor. Mac hurries after him before Davery and Nizhoni realize that it’s a trap—this isn’t the real Mr. Yazzie. Mac disappears into the corridor, which begins shrinking, threatening to crush him.
Nizhoni breaks off a large tree branch and jams it between the narrowing rocks, holding them open. They think that this will work for one hopeful moment before the branch bends and then breaks under the pressure.
Chapter 30 Summary: “The Coolest Moment Ever”
Despite their failed attempt to stop the rocks from closing in, Nizhoni and Davery plunge into the narrowing canyon to save Mac. Nizhoni races through the tunnel, astonished that she can see well in the dark and running far faster than she anticipated. She finds Mac, weeping. She tugs at him, urging him to run, until she realizes that this Mac is an imposter—a monster in disguise. She and the monster fight, but it escapes. When Davery catches up, they realize that the real Mac is nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Avoid the Pointy End”
Davery and Nizhoni make it out of the canyon just before it slams entirely closed. The Rainbow Road is easy to spot, but Nizhoni still feels despondent at losing Mac. Davery tries to reassure her that she did everything she could and that Mac is likely with their dad. They resolve to rescue both and determine that the Rainbow Road’s visibility means that they haven’t failed the first test, or at least that failure doesn’t disqualify them from their quest.
They continue to a field of reeds, which grow sharper and sharper, signaling the “field of knives” from the song (211). Nizhoni urges Davery to cover himself with mud to protect them from the reeds. The plan works until a storm rolls in, washing off the mud. The mud has gotten them far enough that they can finish crossing the field, but their clothes end up in tatters. They walk on, puzzling over the next trial, called “a prom of thorns” in the song (215). They joke about the meaning of “prom” as referring to a school dance and then stop in surprise as a building that resembles a high school appears in front of them.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”
Before they enter the school from which music plays, Davery and Nizhoni confess that they find the prospect of high schoolers more frightening than their previous challenges. A Navajo teen in a tuxedo beckons them into a room full of dancing teenagers and no adults. A girl offers Nizhoni punch, but Davery cautions her not to drink, believing that this is how heroes get stuck “in all the stories” and echoing a similar warning about accepting gifts (219). Davery’s favorite song plays, and he finds himself able to sing unusually well. They agree to dance with nice kids, who are all eager to hear about Davery and Nizhoni’s adventures. They give in to the temptation to eat the refreshments, which are delicious. Nizhoni wishes that Mac were with them, but Davery doesn’t remember him, and soon Mac fades from Nizhoni’s mind as well.
When the next song includes the words “daddy gone,” however, Nizhoni remembers her family and her quest. She realizes that escaping from the temptation of the party is the third trial. She and Davery make for the exit but are blocked by fawning teens. They pull the fire alarm as a distraction and manage to escape. The school vanishes as soon as they exit, revealing it to have been an illusion. As the sun sets, they worry over the time they lost on the third trial and realize that the fourth trial, “a seethe of sand” (225), is just ahead.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Sandcastles”
The field in front of them is full of all different types of mirrors. Nizhoni feels confused until Davery explains that mirrors are made by heating sand. They realize that the trials adhere to contemporary “wonderings,” as Spider Woman told them. They look in various mirrors, remembering that the song urged them to “know [themselves]” to defeat the trials. In one mirror, Nizhoni sees a woman, but Davery can’t see her. Nizhoni pulls the picture of her family from her pocket and realizes that the woman is her mother.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Snow”
Nizhoni touches the mirror and tumbles inside to find herself in a blizzard, but she doesn’t feel cold. Nizhoni’s mom, Bethany, approaches, carrying a whimpering baby. Nizhoni tries to speak to her, but her mom can’t hear her. Her mom addresses the baby as “Nizhoni,” and present-day Nizhoni realizes that she is in one of her mom’s memories. In the memory, her mom urges her to “be a warrior” (232). Bethany sets baby Nizhoni in the snow with only a thin onesie as protection, praising her for her bravery when she doesn’t cry. Bethany bundles baby Nizhoni in blankets and urges her to be tough after she is gone, promising to be with her “in spirit, if not in body” when Nizhoni begins to see monsters (233). Nizhoni sees her mom give her baby self the turquoise necklace.
A crack in the distance sets Bethany running, and present-day Nizhoni follows her toward a house. A voice inside announces a younger version of Nizhoni’s dad. Before he enters the room, however, Bethany grabs a crossbow and leaves the house. Her dad enters, confused to find only toddler Nizhoni. Present-day Nizhoni feels trapped by the memory and cries to be let out until she is deposited back into the mirror field. Shaking, she tells Davery about seeing her mom leave to fight monsters. Nizhoni feels hurt that Bethany chose fighting monsters over her family, though Davery counters that perhaps Bethany had no choice.
Nizhoni is shocked by her intense anger toward her mother, whom she blames both for leaving her family and for failing to kill the monsters, which put Nizhoni on this quest. Davery waits for her to work through her anger, encourages her to give anger management another try after their quests, and guides their attention back to the task at hand. They decide to look into the next mirror together, but when Nizhoni does, Davery is gone.
Chapters 28-34 Analysis
This section of Roanhorse’s novel adheres most closely to the Navajo story of the Hero Twins, Haashch’ééłti’ì and Tó Neinilì, who follow the rainbow trail to seek aid from their father, Jóhonaa’éí, though it also deviates from the traditional narrative in several significant ways. The first two challenges that Nizhoni and Davery encounter along the Rainbow Road—the contracting cliff walls threatening to crush them and the slashing reeds that threaten to cut them—present a faithful adaptation to the original narrative. The latter two trials, however, where the children face the high school full of flatterers who seek to distract them from their task and the field of mirrors that threatens to trap them in their memories, insecurities, and fears, offer a modern interpretation of the field of cane cactuses and boiling dunes depicted in the original myths.
Roanhorse’s text provides implicit clues to the author’s perspective on the adaptation of traditional Navajo legends, highlighting the Importance of Cultural Inheritance and Preservation. In Chapter 33, Jóhonaa’éí (who is not Nizhoni and Mac’s father in Roanhorse’s version of the story) comments on the need to modernize challenges, thus reasserting the quest’s metaphoric and symbolic significance within the narrative. Jóhonaa’éí’s insistence that Nizhoni needs to be challenged according to modern concerns and metrics underscores the parallels that Roanhorse draws between literal monsters and symbolic ones. Nizhoni’s journey centers the literal killing of the monsters she encounters at the end of the Rainbow Road even as it suggests that her role as monsterslayer also necessitates the slaying of “monsters” of interpersonal and systemic racialized violence and oppression facing the Navajo in the broader, non-supernatural world. The fact that the first two challenges in the quest do not materially diverge from their original incarnation, while the second two tasks reflect a modernized interpretation, underscores the perennial nature of the challenges Nizhoni (and, by extension, the Navajo people) face.
The third of these challenges, the “prom of thorns” (215), highlights the specific challenges of adolescence in Nizhoni and Davery’s contemporary world, marrying the traditional legend with an updated context. Nizhoni and Davery claim that high school students (who are still youths but are older than Nizhoni and Davery) are more frightening than the physical threats they have thus far overcome on the Rainbow Road. Metaphorically, the prom of thorns operates on several levels. High schoolers represent a further step on the journey that Davery and Nizhoni are beginning to take into maturity; they are bigger, stronger, and more powerful, yet they do not yet adhere to the rules of adult life. To Nizhoni and Davery, this imbalance of power and unpredictability makes high schoolers potentially dangerous in unknown ways. This unreliability speaks not only to the threat that the high schoolers pose to the younger, more vulnerable middle schoolers but also to what Davery and Nizhoni can expect of themselves as they grow into high schoolers themselves. Adolescence, this paradigm suggests, reflects a similar danger and unknown quality to the other life-threatening challenges Nizhoni and Davery have faced thus far.
However, the students at the prom are unexpectedly welcoming and kind—bordering on obsequious—as Davery and Nizhoni attempt to leave the dance, offering an extreme picture of the allure of popularity and acceptance. Roanhorse frames the appeal of the prom as a dangerous distraction from the overall quest, establishing it as a cautionary symbol of the pursuit of popularity and social prestige at the expense of one’s personal ethics.
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