Summerland

Ethan’s best friend and the novel’s secondary protagonist, Jennifer T. has never felt like she truly belonged anywhere, and like her baseball spikes, “all the furnishings of her life, were stained, scarred, scratched, their laces tattered” (89). While Ethan grapples with self-esteem, Jennifer has enough confidence for both of them while struggling to determine what role she must play in her life and the conflict against Coyote.

Jennifer T.’s character arc centers on learning to understand who she is and, by extension, who others are. Her character arc is complete when she realizes that she’s a valid whole even though she feels like a mix of different cultures and personalities, and this allows her to see how Coyote faces the same struggle for acceptance. In doing so, Jennifer T. learns that Coyote is motivated by the desire for recognition, not just chaos, and she thus can bring about his downfall by releasing the gods from their prison.

The novel’s antagonist, Coyote is a figure from Native American myth. As the trickster god, Coyote is known for making promises he doesn’t keep and for offering someone what they want, only to twist what he gives them so that it barely qualifies as what they agreed to. The novel describes Coyote as having “the face of someone who could see no difference between looking for trouble and looking for fun” (215), and this represents his dueling natures.

Coyote is sometimes called “the Changer” because he brings change, whether welcome or not, to the world. In the framework of the story, this materializes in his desire to remake existence to his design, which further represents how he wants the one thing he can’t have: something that is truly his and not just an alteration of something that someone else created. Coyote represents crossroads and decisions and thus embodies the theme of The Two Sides to Every Story.