jumping the nial summary

Jumping the Nail. Jumping the Nail by Eve Bunting centers around Dru, a teenage girl from La Paloma, California, who watches her peers jump off the Nail, a high cliff. When her depressed friend Elisa jumps, Elisa has mental breakdowns, and in the end drives off the cliff and dies. The setting, where the majority of the action happens is in La Paloma, California which is the home of “The Nail” and “The Deep”. “The Nail” is a 90 foot cliff and “The Deep” is the underwater of the sea. Teenagers jump “The Nail”, even though it is very dangerous, in to “The Deep”. Elisa has lots of flash backs of the jump with scooter. All of her flash backs give her stress which causes her mental breakdowns to become worse. Elisa says that when she took the jump she , the girl that had jumped a few years before them, who drowned in the deep, was down there and she saw her. Over and over in the book Elisa has a flashback to the jump think about the girl. The climax to Jumping the Nail would be when scooter and Elisa jump the nail and in to the deep. After the big jump things go right and left, more and more things go wrong. Elisa and Scooter were both physically fine but mentally the jump really had an impact on Elisa. One of the major themes of this book is jumping. People literally jump off the Nail, but there is another kind of jump as well. As Dru says, "There are all kinds of jumps". Jumping is also an emotional jump or taking an emotional risk. For example, Mike asks Dru to stay in California with him. In other words, he wants her to forego her scholarship at Northwestern. To Dru, this is an emotional jump. He does not ask her to jump the Nail, but he asks her to take a risk in her life. Dru decides not to take this jump with him. She goes to Northwestern. The main character is Dru who just graduated from La Paloma High in California. She is very smart and wins a scholarship to Northwestern in Chicago. She spends her last summer watching her peers jump off