52 pages • 1 hour read
Emiko JeanThe Return of Ellie Black
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Chelsey Calhoun
Content Warning: This source material contains depictions of abuse, neglect, suicide, sexual violence, substance use disorders, and murder. Additionally, this source material discusses racism and sexism.
Chelsey Calhoun is the main protagonist. Chelsey is a detective at the Coldwell Beach police department who specializes in investigating cases of missing girls and women. Chelsey is married to Noah, who wants her to focus on their life together rather than obsessing over work. However, Chelsey uses the cases she works on to cope with her frustration and guilt over her sister, Lydia’s, disappearance and alleged murder, hoping that saving other missing girls will give her relief. Chelsey’s sense that she was responsible for what happened to her sister drives her internal conflict, though the discrimination Chelsey faces from the predominantly white town and police department—Chelsey is Japanese American, the Calhouns having adopted her when she was a little girl—exacerbates The Psychological Impact of Trauma.
Chelsey likewise clings to her idea of who her father was to avoid facing her trauma; she even decided to become a police officer after her parents’ divorce as a way of seeking her father’s approval. Rather than recognize her father’s manipulative and selfish nature, Chelsey idolizes her father as a way of making sense of the uncertainty in her life. Since her husband, Noah, recognizes her father for who he was, her attitude presents a further strain on their marriage, which already suffers from the fact that Chelsey does not know how to prioritize her personal life over her work life.
Lydia’s reappearance and the reality of what happened to her force Chelsey to realize that she viewed her childhood through an idealistic lens and that her inability to properly grieve has forced her to constantly repress her feelings. Once Chelsey faces this reality, she shows her character development by reconnecting with Noah and quitting the force. Chelsey’s decision to pack up her parents’ house symbolically reveals that Chelsey wants to move on from the memories of the past that haunt her.
Ellie Black
Ellie Black is a 19-year-old woman who reappears in Coldwell Beach after having been missing for two years. Before Ellie’s disappearance, she is an outgoing, rebellious teenager. Ellie’s abduction breaks her spirit and turns her into a quiet, fearful girl. She experiences abuse and sexual assault while in captivity and develops acute anxiety, dissociation, and PTSD that cause her to struggle to reacclimate after she is released. Moreover, Ellie cannot fully heal from her trauma because she knows that West only released her so she can she bomb Governor Pike.
Ellie particularly struggles with guilt over Gabrielle’s murder and Hannah’s abuse. Although Ellie feels that Gabrielle and Hannah are like her sisters, West turns the girls against each other through manipulation and fear mongering, forcing Ellie to betray first Gabrielle and then Hannah to protect herself or others. Although Ellie does not fully heal by the end of the novel, her mental exercise of freeing Gabrielle allows her to believe that she will one day forgive herself.
Though West does everything in his power to break Ellie’s will and strip her of her identity, Ellie’s love ultimately overpowers West’s hatred, as she chooses to sacrifice herself to save Willa and Hannah from their captivity. Moreover, Ellie’s prior kindness to Star contributes to the decisive role the dog plays in the book’s climax: Ellie’s natural desire to nurture and love others wins out over West’s brutality when Star disobeys West’s order to attack Chelsey, listening instead to Ellie’s gentle whistle to attack West. The novel therefore vindicates Ellie’s kindness, which has at other points seemed like a liability.
Lydia Calhoun
Lydia Calhoun is Chelsey’s sister, who went missing when she was 15. Chelsey believes that Lydia is dead because West framed Oscar for her murder. However, Lydia is actually alive but going by the name Serendipity—a sign of how thoroughly West has stripped Lydia of her past identity.
Although Lydia is complicit in many of West’s crimes, she has also been shaped by West’s abuse. To cope, she detaches herself from reality, persuading herself that West loves her and that he would never do anything to hurt her. For this reason, Ellie and the other girls do not trust Lydia because they understand that she will not protect them. The extent to which Lydia’s trauma causes her to reinvent reality becomes clear when Chelsey visits Lydia in the correctional facility. In explaining how she went missing and how West killed Oscar, Lydia blames herself for West’s actions, saying that she went out with Oscar to make West jealous. As Chelsey speaks with Lydia, the former realizes that Lydia’s mental state remains frozen at 15 years old. Lydia has not grown up, because she cannot move on mentally from the day that West abducted her.
West Abbott
West Abbott is the novel’s primary antagonist. Throughout Ellie’s flashbacks, he goes by the name David to keep his anonymity. He is a sadistic, misogynistic man who blames everything in his life on his mother, Governor Pike. When West’s parents divorced, West refused to recognize that his parents’ marriage dissolved because of his father’s alcohol addiction. Instead, West blamed his mother for leaving Abbott and developed an extreme hatred of women. West indoctrinated his brother Doug and enlisted him in kidnapping young women and keeping them at the compound by their kennel. His ostensible goal is to create a family that will not leave him; it was when West realized that Lydia could not have children that he began kidnapping girls in an attempt to force them to have his child. However, West’s idea of “family” is deeply intertwined with patriarchal control of women. Chelsey realizes at the end of the novel that any time Governor Pike experienced a success in her career, Doug and West kidnapped a girl, whom they would then attempt to mold into a model of “proper” womanhood. West destroys these girls’ autonomy and strips them of their identity by renaming them and telling them that the compound is their new home. He even rapes them to express his dominance over women. When this does not satisfy West’s rage, he trains Ellie to build a bomb to kill Governor Pike while he holds Willa hostage at the compound.
West’s decision to use religious names for himself, Doug, and the girls shows his sense of grandiosity; he believes that he is doing something unprecedented when in fact he is simply carrying societal misogyny to an extreme. Given West’s hatred of women, it is narratively fitting that two women—Ellie and Chelsey—prove to be his undoing. Likewise, West’s sadism catches up with him in the end when Ellie turns one of his trained dogs against him.
