*****SPOILERS*****
I
have three miscellaneous observations.
After three novels, I have a
confession to make: I hate Lena’s poetry. It’s awful and painful.
They just walked across dead
grasshoppers. Gross.
Ethan notes than Liv says
‘strawberry’ in two syllables. It never occurred to me that Americans didn’t
say it with two syllables.
The Giggles
This
book made me hungry for me. The humour from the first book was revitalised in a
glorious comeback. Like when Amma saves watermelon rinds for Link’s mother
because they’re both sour.
Ridley made me chuckle a lot. ‘It
begins with B and rhymes with bitch.’ Perfect! (Well, ‘bitch’ should have had
quotation marks but we can’t have perfection.) Also, ‘Books? Carry?’ left me in
hysterics.
One of Ethan’s aunts repeatedly
shouts, ‘Fanny!’ Considering what ‘fanny’ means in the UK, I couldn’t help but
giggle. The aunts made me laugh again because they’re convinced ‘if’ is short
for ‘iffin’.
Mrs English is with Ethan’s dad and
Ethan thinks, ‘But here she was, existing all over my father.’ Brilliant.
Aunt Grace claims she read a fact in
the ‘Reader’s Digestive.’ Sounds like my kind of magazine!
Thinkers
When
a novel makes you stop reading and ponder a thought for a moment, that shows a
level of depth that is not required but greatly appreciated.
Macon notes that being hungry is an
‘incredible inconvenience.’ Firstly, yes, it is: it’s something so normal that
people don’t think about it. Secondly, even though Macon says it like it’s new
despite him having experienced hunger before, even though he was a caster (not
an incubus) until he was at university. So he has experienced hunger before.
Perhaps it’s only having lived without it that he realises it’s inconvenient?
It’s good to see Ethan correcting
Link’s perception of voodoo. Correcting bad misconceptions was especially
important in this book because we only see the negative side of voodoo.
We have a touching moment when Ethan
thinks about his dead mum: ‘on a bad day it meant maybe she had never existed
at all.’
‘The future can be changed. Fate cannot.’
This is brilliant, solving the conflict people have over free will and
determinism.
Another interesting thought is Ethan
wondering ‘if wishing was the same thing as praying.’
The final observation is that the
maths ‘test really didn’t matter… the pie really did.’ I can sympathise with
that.
Problems
These
weren’t massive problems but they were still distracting.
In the same paragraph, we have Link
speaking and internal monologue from Ethan. If it’s not Link, it shouldn’t be
in Link paragraph.
Lena and Liv’s argument at the party
is epic. Apart from one line of thought. Lena blames it on a furer cast. Yet
two pages later, Liv repeats this observation and Lena scoffs, asking if Liv
really thinks it’s ‘some kind of cast’. Then when Liv says it’s a furer, Lena
boasts that she said it was a furer first. What a mess.
Link is a quarter incubus and yet
food is completely inedible. Surely the three-quarters mortal in him still
needs some food? Surely as most of him is mortal, most of his nutrition would need
to come from mortal sources? Food could still be less pleasurable so Link would
still be justified in missing his full enjoyment of food. So having these facts
as more consistent would remove the humour.
Abraham says Ethan’s had a few
trysts with a Caster. But since the first book, we’re constantly reminded how
mortals and casters can’t physically be together. Does Abraham not know the
meaning of ‘tryst’? (Or is it the authors?)
When Ethan says goodbye to the
departed Prue, Amma slaps him and tells him not to scare her like that again.
I’ve read this book several times but I don’t understand what scared Amma.
It’s mentioned that Serafine
accidentally set herself on fire. But no, it was clear that Lena used the fire
Serafine created in order to burn Serafine.
The book ends with Amma trying to
stop Ethan killing himself. It’s really emotional. You feel for Amma, her love
and loss. But Ethan has to die for the order of the universe to be restored. So
you feel for Amma even more because you know she won’t win. It was truly a
beautiful construction. One thing let it down, though: the bokor releasing
enslaved spirits. They did nothing other than be sent away by Macon. They
didn’t properly seem like a threat that could disrupt Ethan’s plans. They
should have been either amplified or cut from the script.
The
pace of this whole book was consistently speedy and it managed not to trip over
its own feet. The story flowed nicely. It was leagues ahead of book two in
terms of quality. I regained my hope for the series.
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