40 pages • 1 hour read
Invisible Emmie
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Prelogue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prelogue Summary
The story’s protagonist, Emmie Douglass, introduces herself as a “puddle of slime” who recently had an embarrassing incident (i). She never really found herself attractive to begin with, but now she feels even worse. An illustration shows a puddle of slime with eyes.
Prologue Summary
Emmie is dissatisfied with typical stories about outcasts, as she feels like these stories never feature a kid who goes unnoticed; instead, it is always someone who is remarkable in some way. Emmie wonders where she fits into all of this since she isn’t picked on or extraordinary; instead, she is just an ordinary girl who nobody seems to realize exists. Emmie recounts the standard progression of these stories, in which a stereotypical outcast is bullied and then finds a way to get revenge or learn something from the experience. These children are illustrated in the most stereotypical fashion, with the smart kid wearing glasses and the strange kid with bulging, bloodshot eyes. They also seem to magically make friends as they go along this journey of self-discovery. An illustration shows Emmie sitting with a paper bag over her head and cobwebs attached to her. She wonders about kids who are “heroes in waiting” (4).
Chapter 1 Summary
Emmie is 13 years old, in seventh grade, and “pretty quiet.” A drawing of her next to a mouse indicates their similarities. She was more talkative when she was little, and she wonders if she grew tired of competing with her older siblings or just had no one her age to talk to. She was born several years after her older siblings, and now that they’ve both moved out, she spends much of her time alone as her parents work a lot. Her parents were more present for her siblings, but they seemed less enthusiastic about parenting by the time she came along. Though they are gone most of the time, they seem to hover over her when they are home. Emmie’s mother runs a fitness center and is a health enthusiast, which Emmie jokes gives her a “six pack toe” (10), illustrated with an enlarged, muscly toe. She can relate more with her father, who is quiet like her. Emmie’s best friend, Brianna, lives one suburb over. Emmie prides herself most for her drawing abilities, as she feels drawing is the one thing that makes her stand out from others, including her siblings. An illustration shows her standing next to a wall of art in her house with a look of pride on her face.
Chapter 2 Summary
Emmie’s imaginary character, Katie, introduces herself next. The artistic style shifts from muted tones to a flood of color and upper-case letters. Katie is a confident girl who thinks of herself quite highly, noting her beautiful hair and “a hundred texts” waiting for her (14). Her parents own a candy business and are always cooking up fun meals, and she has so many friends that they don’t even fit in her house when she throws parties. Katie is skilled at volleyball, studies hard, and is committed to maintaining her friendships. She calls herself an “average teenage girl” (19), but the illustration shows her being crowned Homecoming Queen in seventh grade.
Prelogue-Chapter 2 Analysis
The humor and creativity of Emmie, the story’s narrator, is evident from the first page. She opens the story with a “Prelogue,” something she invented to go before the Prologue. This Prelogue hints at the conflict of the story as she refers to herself as a “puddle of slime” but does not explain how she came to feel that way (i), creating intrigue and suspense. Emmie also uses wordplay, inventing new words like “smartitude” and “nerdity” when existing ones won’t do. Finally, Emmie challenges what it means to be a protagonist in a story about a middle-schooler. She finds that the protagonists of these stories usually fit into one of three types, but she fits none of these. She pokes fun at these clichés, such as when she points out that the smart kids are always drawn with glasses and the less-than-smart kids are always drawn with acne.
Emmie’s observation of conventional middle-grade novels works on multiple levels. It serves as a straightforward critique of unrealistic depictions of young people in fiction, and it sets up the expectation that Invisible Emmie, with its relatable protagonist, will subvert these clichés. While Katie’s character conforms to the very clichés Emmie is criticizing, this is because Katie is herself fictional, a product of Emmie’s imagination.
These chapters introduce the theme of Coping With and Overcoming Anxiety. Emmie’s major conflict stems from her anxiety and the fact that she feels like an “outcast” at school. Friendship is important to Emmie, but her only friend is in different classes. Her feelings of social isolation are compounded by the fact that she was born much later than her siblings, who have already moved out. One of her primary ways of coping with her anxiety is drawing, which offers her a temporary reprieve from the stress of school. Another coping mechanism that won’t be revealed as such until the end of the story is the character of Katie. Emmie creates Katie to express the things she feels but cannot say and to dream about a life she does not have. Unlike Emmie, Katie has a perfect life with cool parents and lots of friends; she likes school and never seems to feel anxious. Her description of herself as an “average teenage girl” is thus laced with irony (19). She has much more in common with the extraordinary fictional protagonists Emmie pokes fun of in the Prologue—the first clue Libenson provides that Katie may not be a real person.
Libenson uses contrasting visuals to help develop her characterizations of Emmie and Katie, telling the story through images as well as words. The artistic style shifts dramatically during Katie’s sections; the panels become blocked and full of color, and Katie’s whole world seems magnified and beautiful. Emmie’s drawings of her own life, on the other hand, are full of empty spaces that she hopes to someday fill, and her self-portraits are simplistic and somewhat blank, as if she doesn’t really know who she is. Invisible Emmie is a unique take on a middle-grade graphic novel that mixes prose and comic-style art into one unified story.
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