-pg. 2 p. 2 "perspicuous"
-pg. 2 p. 2-3 "It is not obvious where "thinking" as such (by contrast to "inspiration") oxxuea in poetry. Is
it part of "inspiration?" (But that means "breathing in," a process hardly comparable to thinking.) Is thinking
evident in the finished poem? A poem, after all, need not make an obvious argument; it need not adduce
evidence; it need not asset a visibly new insight, it may be independent of a received cultural system [...]. A
poem can be more lighthearted than the usual "thinking" process; it can be satiric, or frivolous, or
mischievous. High seriousness may attend it---or may not. Bizarre imaginative fantasies may be what a poem has
to offer; or "non-sense"; or some reduction of language that would normally be considered inadequate to "adult"
thinking (Blake: "Little lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?"). Unlike the structure of a
perspicuous argument, the structure of a poem may be anything but transparent, at least at first glance.
In short, the relation of poetry to thought is an uneasy one."
-pg. 5 p. 2 "All poems, it seems to me, contain within themselves implicit instructions concerning how they should be read. These encoded instructions---housed in the sum of all the forms in which a a poem is cast, from the smallest phonetic group to the largest philosophical set---ought to be introduced as evidence for any offered interpretation. In recent years, such intentionality has often been disregarded or resisted. The New Historicists, for instance, focus on contexts which, though perhaps relevant to the ideological contents of a poem, are irrelevant to its intrinsic processes. A "hermeneutic of suspicion" asks what social phenomena the poem may be concealing rather than by what aesthetic laws it may be constituted. The poems too often conscripted into illustrating a social idea not germane to its own inner workings. And though any author is of course a child of an era, it is probably impossible to illustrate (with any credibility) an era by a lyric, or a lyric by an era: the grid is too small in the first case, too large in the second It could be argued that the case changes when one considers the whole life-work of a poet---and what a poor use of Whitman's inventive genius it is to look to his poetry for larger inferences about civil war or American democracy or nineteenth-century materialism. All that is remarkable in him tends to vanish when he is used as a means of cultural illustration, and his poems of less ideological relevance under this treatment, sink without a trace."
-pg. 121 p. 2 "It is disturbing that even a fellow-poet can suppose that the poems of a "major poet" can exist
without "a particle of intellect." This is the absolute conclusion concerning the work of Elizabeth Bishop
patronizingly voiced by the poet William Logan in a recent review:
'Elizabeth Bishop is now often considered [Lowell's] equal, or even superior. . . . She is, to be sure,
charming and endlessly resourceful, a major poet who often pretended to be a minor one, an innocent
masquerading as a faux innocent. . . . A reader can nevertheless grow tired of poems with so much charm and not
a particle of intellect.'
It would take an essay to expatiate on the presence of intellect in Bishop's poems---an intellect meditating on
the nature of abstract modernism ("The Monument"), on problems of gender (too many poems to mention, from "The
Gentleman of Shalott" to "In the Waiting Room"), on the curious prevalence of the aesthetic at all social
levels ("The Filling Station"), on the painful acquisition of knowledge ("At the Fishhouses"), on the nature of
home and homelessness ("Crusoe in England"), on the search for existential meaning in the absence of religious
belief ("Over 2,000 Illustrations"). William Logan's denial of "a particle of poetry---has a peculiarly limited
conception of what intellect is and how it may manifest itself."
-pg.16 "effluvia"
-pg. 20 "prelapsarian, proleptically"
-pg. 25 p.1 "alogicalternary"
-pg. 25-26 p. 1 "And, in answer to an obvious objection--that a philosophical system should be expressed in
prose--he adds"
This I might have done in prose; but I chose verse, and even rhyme, for two reasons. The one will appear
obvious; that principles, maxims, or precepts so written, both strike the reader, more strongly at first, and
are more easily retained by him afterwards: The other may seem odd, but is true, I found I could express them
more *shortly* this way than in prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that much of the *force* as
well as *grace* of arguments or instructions, depends on their *conciseness.* I was unable to treat this part
of my subject more in *detail,* without becoming dry and tedious, or more *poetically,* without sacrificing
perspicuity to ornament, wihout wandering from the precision, or breaking the chain of reasoning. If any man
can unite all these without dimunition of any of them, I freely confess he will compass a thing above my
capacity.
One believes Pope's statement: he wanted to find force and grace, a balance between tedium (creating a poem too
detailed, too prosy) and over-ornamentation (creating a poem too fantastic, too "poetic," too "imprecise"). And
yet, when I say that what delights the poet is "unintelligibility," I mean to point to those passages in which
languages doesn't sound like anything anyone could possibly say either in "real life" or in "real philosophy."
The disquistion on the horse and the ox is such a passage. To read it aloud is almost inevitably to stumble--in
intonation, emphasis, or enunciation--at lines six and seven in the attempt to connect them tonally, all at
once, with the horse and ox and man--"His actions', passions', being's, use and end; / Why, doing, suffering,
checked, impelled; and why--." The effect is that of a grammatical surfeit of indigestible words--first all
nouns, then all verbs--rather than that of a meaningful conceptual utterance, or an utterance aiming to
enlighten a reader."
-pg. 30 "prosodically," "medical caesura"
-pg. 32 p. 4 "Pope thereby shows us the "contamination" of the rhythm of thinking by what is being thought about."
“I walked through a forest near a highway until I found a clump of moss to sleep on and remembered that Simon
said possums were not indigenous to New Zealand, that they had been brought here by somebody a long time ago,
some European, and since there were no animals here that liked to kill possums, all those unkilled possums
had fucked up the whole fucking ecosystem by eating plants, too many plants, by wanting so much, and
now there were
what? --ten or fifteen possums per person in New Zealand? Something fucked up like that; and I
imagined my dozen fucked-up possums gathered around me, a personal audience,
and I wondered which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous, but it isn’t as easy to
trace those kinds of things in a person as it is in a country. I wished that I could point to some colonizer
and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had
made me misunderstand myself--but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone,
populated entirely by myself, which made me think, again, of Ruby on that Thanksgiving night on the swings, or maybe it was another night
like that night when she was talking, I thought, about how predictable she felt...”
-(pg.30)
(I really enjoyed this passage right from the beginning. It really seems to hold so much of the book in two or
three ridiculously run on sentences. Elyria, in her depression, has just disappeared and is on her way to the
farm and we’re just starting to get into her issues as she says this. It stood out to me because I often seem
to be trying to trace my history to the roots of issues. I love that she describes it as an invasive species.
In so many books about depression I haven’t heard a better idea than something that is brought into a place
that has no defense against it. Like the possums, Elyria’s grief came to her when she was young and instead of
being dealt with it has grown and populated within her into the monster she refers to as the ‘wildebeest’ that
makes her numb and unloving.)
“And she said, Anything else? And I thought for a second and said, Coffee, and this seemed to explain
something to her, this desire for a cup of coffee at some hour that must have been close to midnight, and so
BELINDA smiled and said, All right, sweetie.
I spent the next memorable portion of my life watching the rippled surface of my coffee quiver and I knew with
an increasing intensity that everyone on this planet is also always shaking ever so slightly all the time, that
the earth shakes us by shifting and settling its stone self, and the machines we’ve made, they also shake us,
the air conditioners and eighteen wheelers and marriages and electric generators and the people who dance with
so much stomping and the bulldozers and the cars that go so fast and hit other cars and animals and the radio
signals and the lives around us that run at a frequency that interferes with our own frequencies. We do not
notice any of this shaking until we do btu notice people will be able to forget it for a while until they
notice again but I cannot stop seeing how the earth and everything on it is ever and ever shaking, all the
time, the plant stems breaking through sidewalk and the steel beams and the skyscrapers and the people who
think they are sitting perfectly still, and I can’t seem to stop seeing everything quivering all the time,
husbands sitting in armchairs and chalkboards and brick courtyards and the tops of trees you can see from the
windows and good knives and linen shirts, and being unable to unsee the little shake that is everywhere has
made it too difficult for me to go about life in the way that other people seem to be able to go about it,
people ordering lunch in a deli and old ladies wearing too many coats and the policemen on smoke breaks and
teenagers with secrets and smiles and the birds that just fly and are, and the leashed dogs, walking leashed in
the streets, tethered to their owners, happily tethered forever.
No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a
life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned in my stomach,
to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my
throat without voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and
BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite
because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking.”
-(pg.243-244)
(These last few pages of the novel are just nutty. Somehow they manage to explain nothing and everything. As I
read I assumed one of two things would happen: she’d end up back with her husband or she’d die, by her own hand
or by something in New Zealand that had been waiting for so long. Instead they have her keep running. Elyria
gets home and she leaves, again. It bugs me and satisfies me because in a sense that’s all the book has been
leading up to: Elyria’s escape from the suffocation she feels. Emotionless and lost, returning home has never
been an option. This passage helps to exemplify this. Just before is a moment of clarity as you hear a
psychiatrist ask Elyria questions that clearly explain what’s been upsetting her (PTSD/Depression) and it
leaves you with a hope that she’ll get help but she doesn’t. She’s still moving, still running, even though
there’s nothing left to run for anymore except to keep existing in her eyes.)
“Corn can add inches in a single day; if you listened, you could hear it grow. Finn caught the
familiar whisper—here, here, here—and wished it would shut up.
His friend Miguel would have agreed. Miguel hated the corn, said the plants seemed... alive. When Finn reminded
him that, duh, of course the corn was alive, all plants were alive, Miguel replied that the corn sounded
alive alive. As if it wasn’t just growing, it was ripping itself out of the ground and sneaking around
on skinny white roots. Scarecrows weren’t made to scare the crows, they were made to scare the corn. It was
enough to give a person nightmares. Otherwise, why would so many horror movies have cornfields in them (pg.5
P2)?”
-I like this quote because it not only sets up the portal/corn aspect that becomes the crux of the story later
on, but it gives a spooky edge to everything. Why do Finn and his friend think about things like corn walking
around? What’s really wrong with the place if that is their topic of discussion?
“Orienteering (pg. 37 P14).” : “Orienteering is a group of sports that require navigational
skills using a map and compass to navigate from point to point in diverse and usually unfamiliar terrain whilst
moving at speed. Participants are given a topographical map, usually a specially prepared
orienteering map, which they use to find control points (Wiki).”
-This is the activity that Miguel and his family do over summer/holidays. This is how Roza finds Bone Gap in
the first place. She ends up in the woods that the family orienteers through. Good storytelling to have
included that right from the start. Lots of tie ins.
“It had been his idea to meet at the diner, but soon as she’d put on this dumb dress, she knew
she wanted to do all the dumb things everyone else did. She wanted to go out for ice cream, she wanted to
go to the movies, she wanted to go to the movies, she wanted to hold hands while running through the rain,
she wanted to get into idiotic spats over idiotic things, she wanted to make out until she didn’t know whose
tongue was whose.
But none of these things would happen if Finn were too good to be true, if he were some character out of a
tale, if she’d made him up through loneliness and sheer will:
And so the young lovers had a month together before he was stomped to death by his magical horse (pg.204 P3).”
-I like finally seeing things from Petey’s perspective. Not that she’s badly represented by Finn’s perspective
(and strangely goes unmentioned in Roza’s, odd since a story point is their late night friendships...), but you
don’t get how sweet and dreamy she is. I like the dichotomy this author achieves of a young woman who is
hardened by how people treat her but there’s still a part of her that wants to believe in people and the
possibility of love they hold.
“They kissed until his brain spun, until her limbs fell loose and soft and open, until the moon hid its face
behind a veil of clouds. She pulled off his shirt and he pulled off hers, and the bra with it, lingering over
her breasts, tasting the salt and sweet of her. She was so beautiful in the firelight, glowing like an ember,
and he thought he said it out loud, beautiful, beautiful, but he couldn’t be sure. He wanted to hear her say
his name, he wanted to make her feel so good she’d never leave him, he wanted so many things he lost the words
for them all. He unbuttoned her jeans and slid them away, and the wisp of white cotton she wore underneath, his
lips tracing a path across her belly, the half-moons of her hip bones, down one thigh, up the other, and back
to the center, where he kissed, and kissed, and forgot where he was and who he was and who he had hurt and who
he had not saved. She clenched the blanket in her fists, and sighed, and breathed his name, and if she hadn’t
said it out loud, he wouldn’t have known what to call himself, because everything was her (pg. 246 P8).”
-I’d like to perform a study of YA sex scenes because I swear it took me years to actually realize what they
were actually sex scenes at all. I don’t know if it's an art of subtlety or an inability to explicitly say
anything, but they are a strange bird of fiction writing. As far as subtle sex, I think this one is lovely.
There is a poetry to it. A sort of voice that carries a lot of love.
“But wasn’t that love? Seeing what no one else could? And yet if it wasn’t enough for her that she was
beautiful to him, if she couldn’t believe him (pg. 253 P10)...”
- This made me love Finn. His confusion over Petey’s upset was oddly endearing, and the continued rage over how
mistreated she must’ve been to not believe his love.
“In despair, he left that farm
and came to Bone Gap when it was a huge expanse of empty fields, drawn here by the grass and the bees and
the strange sensation that this was a magical place, that the bones of the world were a little looser here
and, double-jointed, twisting back on themselves, leaving spaces one could slip into and hide. He had the place to himself for years, but he wasn’t so stupid as to keep horses. He kept goats. And when he
loved the goats too much, he gave them up for sheep. And when he loved the lambs too much, he gave them up for
chickens (pg. 278 P3).”
-I still don’t fully understand Charlie’s character. What is his loving too much? What’s his tragic backstory?
It sounds like he’s an immortal trapped there similarly to the evil man that took Roza. Perhaps on a second
reading the mythology would come through clearer. As for this quote, its use of the title and description of
the meaning is rather lovely.
“Sean had never told her he loved her. He’d given her his drawings, he had eaten her food as if he had been
taking Communion, he’d trembled when she kissed him, but he had never said it. And neither had she, the two of
them hiding behind their mother tongues as if there was no way to bridge the gap (pg. 314 P6).”
-Sean and Roza are such a good pair. For straight couples, I thought this book did a pretty good job of getting
me to care about them. This sorta quote is something I’d like to carry over for my own writing of
relationships.
“[...] What is that herb by the path?”
“Strawflower.”
“And that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fourfoil, they call it.” Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged
looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing
more, “What is its use, Master?”
“None I know of.”
Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away.
“When you know
the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its
true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? Or of myself? Is
Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?”
-(chapter 2)
“Farmer, goatherd, cattle herd, hunter or artisan. The landsman looks at the ocean as at a salt unsteady realm
that has nothing to do with him at all. The village two days walk from his village is a foreign land and the
island a day’s sail from his island is a mere rumor. Misty hills seen across the water, not solid ground like
that he walks on. So, to Ged, who’d never been down from the heights of the mountain the port of Gont was an
awesome and marvelous place.”
-(chapter 2)
“The Master took it and held it out in his own hand, ‘This is a rock. Tolk, in the true speech,’ he said,
looking mildly up at Ged now, ‘A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the dry land in
which men live, it is itself. It is part of the world. By the illusion change you can make it look like a
diamond, or a flower, or a fly, or an eye, or a flame.’ The rock flickered from shape to shape as he named them
and returned to rock. ‘But that is mere seeming, the illusion fools the beholder’s senses. It makes him see and
hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change this rock into a jewel,
you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the
world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it when
you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand. Until you know
what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance. In equilibrium. A wizard’s power of
changing and of summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous.
It must follow knowledge and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.’ He looked down at the pebble
again. ‘A rock is a good thing too you know.’ he said, speaking less gravely, ‘ If the Isles of Earthsea were
all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.’”
-(chapter 3)
“Who knows a man’s name holds that man’s life in his keeping. Thus, to Ged, who had lost faith in himself,
Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give. The proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.”
-(chapter 4)
[A gift only a true friend would give. Story idea: two witches are best friends and have a summoning spell for
each other should they ever need it someday in the future. Decades pass after their bond is struck and both
have long family lines. One day a great great granddaughter is working in garden/some other medial task when a
soft voice calls to her and gets louder, saying something she can’t quite understand. When she steps forward to
find the voice, she is transported to an unfamiliar land where a girl is struggling against something. She
helps the girl and finds out the story of the spell that brought her there. Together they must solve the
mystery of what attacked the girl and maybe they fall in love, you know, maybe ;)]
“Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew, that had none touched him when he lay thus, spirit
lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb, instinctive
wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet, in that wisdom, Ged saw something
akin to his own power. Something that went as deep as wizardry. And from that time forth he believed that the
wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things. Whether they have speech or not, and in
later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of
birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”
(chap. 5)
“But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the
grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something
beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep
inside himself.
Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor (pg.51 P1).”
Quote shows the differences between Gansey and Adam, and establishes their characters that way. It also made me
like Gansey a lot more. Stepping back, I feel like the poor little rich boy character is kind of overdone and
stereotypic, but I’m honestly so glad that Gansey isn’t an actual jerk we have to forgive all the time. He’s
dumb and can be unaware of his actions, but as a person, Gansey seems to care an awful lot and that’s
important, especially since we’re going to have to like him for a whole series now.
“[I]f the journal had been [Blue’s], she would’ve just copied down the information she needed, rather than all
this cutting and pasting. The fragments were intriguing but unnecessary; whoever put that journal together must
love the hunt itself, the process of research. The aesthetic properties of the journal couldn’t be accidental,
it was an academic piece of art (pg. 107 P11).”
I identify heavily with this description of the journal. So much of my art is in the process I find: I really
love saving quotes and pasting them in places, filling in journals with collected crap. It’s satisfying to
gather it and watch it grow, much more so than I’ve found final pieces can be.
“Dolorously (pg. 127 P6): adjective. full of, expressing, or causing pain or sorrow; grievous;
mournful (dictionary.com).”
From a description of a dog they pass.
“Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on this world because of the head
start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused,
and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich (pg. 131 P9).”
This pair of friends is so interesting, due to this dichotomy. By all means, Adam and Gansey should never meet
and should never get along. They seem to be the stereotypes that should be in constant opposition and
competition with one another, but instead they’re best friends. Blue may be meant to be Gansey’s soulmate and
Adam’s love interest, but I would assume there are plenty that ship these two star crossed lovers.
“Compunction (pg.174 P2): noun
a feeling of guilt or moral scruple that prevents or follows the doing of something bad. "spend the money
without compunction (dictionary.com).”
Used when the evil teacher is going through Gansey’s locker and remembering how his father used to pay the
school off for him without issue.
“A few feet away in the cavity, Gansey’s head was bowed. He looked like a statue in the church, his hands
clasped in front of him. There was something very ancient about him just then, with the tree arched over him
and his eyelids rendered colorless in the shadows. He was himself, but he was something else too -- that
something Blue had first seen in him at the boys’ reading, that sense of otherness, of
something more, seemed to radiate from that still portrait of Gansey enshrined in the dark tree (pg.
229 P2).”
This is a beautiful descriptive scene. I particularly like that Gansey holds so much mystery and intrigue to
the others and then from his perspective, nothing seems all that magical. He’s mystical and other to everyone
else, but himself.
“She had made it only a few steps when Neeve said to her back, “You’re looking for a god. Didn’t you suspect
that there was also a devil (pg. 284 P1).”
Creepy Aunt Neeve being creepy. Something about all of the magic in this book feels incredibly familiar and I
don’t know if it’s the basis of femininity or its mythology. Neeve’s whole scene here felt very devil
worship/horror movie-esque and I really liked that part.
“We’d meant to disable her,” Persephone acknowledged. “But we seem to have disappeared her instead. It’s
possible she will reappear at some point (pg. 404 P2).”
A lot of this book feels like a prep and a promise of what’s to come, including this line. Usually I hate that
fact about series, but this one, I’m sort of excited to see where it takes all these open ended points.
There’s definitely a portion of this book that bugs me, the soulmate/romance angle had me rolling my eyes right
at the beginning, but I’ve gotten over it since then. The plot being driven by a bunch of white collar high
school boys also bugged me, though these characters are made to be multifaceted, I probably wouldn’t have stuck
with this book without the recommendations I kept hearing. The ending was really quickly brought together and
there’s a certain point that it feels like we skipped altogether, I will see if we return to it in the next
book, but as of yet, unresolved and unsatisfied there.
As for the things I liked. The characters are all pretty enjoyable, I don’t find any particularly annoying and
the multiple perspectives aspect definitely makes them all that little bit more interesting. I also like the
POV switching in this book. I want to study it a bit for my own writing, specifically the fact that she doesn’t
clearly tag when it switches. Most are separated by chapters, but not as a rule, and none of them are headed by
names or symbols that make sure you know who you’re about to read. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious pattern
to the POV switches and it is often used as a storytelling element to keep us hanging on as the plot develops.
The movement of time is also really interesting, I feel like there are even points where the author has
characters point out their ability to wait and put things on hold. It makes the ending chapters even starker by
how short and quick they are. The pace changes and suddenly the characters have to move to match it. I liked
this aspect and I’m curious to see where we start off in the next one.
“But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the
grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something
beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep
inside himself.
Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor (pg.51 P1).”
Quote shows the differences between Gansey and Adam, and establishes their characters that way. It also made me
like Gansey a lot more. Stepping back, I feel like the poor little rich boy character is kind of overdone and
stereotypic, but I’m honestly so glad that Gansey isn’t an actual jerk we have to forgive all the time. He’s
dumb and can be unaware of his actions, but as a person, Gansey seems to care an awful lot and that’s important,
especially since we’re going to have to like him for a whole series now.
“[I]f the journal had been [Blue’s], she would’ve just copied down the information she needed, rather than all
this cutting and pasting. The fragments were intriguing but unnecessary; whoever put that journal together must
love the hunt itself, the process of research. The aesthetic properties of the journal couldn’t be accidental,
it was an academic piece of art (pg. 107 P11).”
I identify heavily with this description of the journal. So much of my art is in the process I find: I really
love saving quotes and pasting them in places, filling in journals with collected crap. It’s satisfying to
gather it and watch it grow, much more so than I’ve found final pieces can be.
“Dolorously (pg. 127 P6): adjective. full of, expressing, or causing pain or sorrow; grievous; mournful
(dictionary.com).”
From a description of a dog they pass.
“Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on this world because of the head
start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused,
and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich (pg. 131 P9).”
This pair of friends is so interesting, due to this dichotomy. By all means, Adam and Gansey should never meet
and should never get along. They seem to be the stereotypes that should be in constant opposition and
competition with one another, but instead they’re best friends. Blue may be meant to be Gansey’s soulmate and
Adam’s love interest, but I would assume there are plenty that ship these two star crossed lovers.
“Compunction (pg.174 P2): noun
a feeling of guilt or moral scruple that prevents or follows the doing of something bad. "spend the money
without compunction (dictionary.com).”
Used when the evil teacher is going through Gansey’s locker and remembering how his father used to pay the
school off for him without issue.
“A few feet away in the cavity, Gansey’s head was bowed. He looked like a statue in the church, his hands
clasped in front of him. There was something very ancient about him just then, with the tree arched over him and
his eyelids rendered colorless in the shadows. He was himself, but he was something else too -- that something
Blue had first seen in him at the boys’ reading, that sense of otherness, of something more,
seemed to radiate from that still portrait of Gansey enshrined in the dark tree (pg. 229 P2).”
This is a beautiful descriptive scene. I particularly like that Gansey holds so much mystery and intrigue to the
others and then from his perspective, nothing seems all that magical. He’s mystical and other to everyone else,
but himself.
“She had made it only a few steps when Neeve said to her back, “You’re looking for a god. Didn’t you suspect
that there was also a devil (pg. 284 P1).”
Creepy Aunt Neeve being creepy. Something about all of the magic in this book feels incredibly familiar and I
don’t know if it’s the basis of femininity or its mythology. Neeve’s whole scene here felt very devil
worship/horror movie-esque and I really liked that part.
“We’d meant to disable her,” Persephone acknowledged. “But we seem to have disappeared her instead. It’s
possible she will reappear at some point (pg. 404 P2).”
A lot of this book feels like a prep and a promise of what’s to come, including this line. Usually I hate that
fact about series, but this one, I’m sort of excited to see where it takes all these open ended points.
There’s definitely a portion of this book that bugs me, the soulmate/romance angle had me rolling my eyes right
at the beginning, but I’ve gotten over it since then. The plot being driven by a bunch of white collar high
school boys also bugged me, though these characters are made to be multifaceted, I probably wouldn’t have stuck
with this book without the recommendations I kept hearing. The ending was really quickly brought together and
there’s a certain point that it feels like we skipped altogether, I will see if we return to it in the next
book, but as of yet, unresolved and unsatisfied there.
As for the things I liked. The characters are all pretty enjoyable, I don’t find any particularly annoying and
the multiple perspectives aspect definitely makes them all that little bit more interesting. I also like the POV
switching in this book. I want to study it a bit for my own writing, specifically the fact that she doesn’t
clearly tag when it switches. Most are separated by chapters, but not as a rule, and none of them are headed by
names or symbols that make sure you know who you’re about to read. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious pattern
to the POV switches and it is often used as a storytelling element to keep us hanging on as the plot develops.
The movement of time is also really interesting, I feel like there are even points where the author has
characters point out their ability to wait and put things on hold. It makes the ending chapters even starker by
how short and quick they are. The pace changes and suddenly the characters have to move to match it. I liked
this aspect and I’m curious to see where we start off in the next one.