*****SPOILERS*****
Ethan being
Stupid. Again.
I
know Ethan is still legally a child but my goodness he is stupid sometimes.
Take when he thinks, ‘The songs
never lie.’ Yet this is only the second Caster song he’s heard. There aren’t
enough examples of the songs being truthful to say they always are. If he said
he believed this song because the last one was truthful, that would be fine.
About Lena and John, Ethan wonders, ‘How
long has she been hanging out with him without telling me?’ Excuse you, Ethan,
but she doesn’t have to tell you
anything. And she can be friends with whomever she chooses.
About Liv, Ethan says ‘every time we
were together, we found our way into trouble.’ This statement simply isn’t
justified. In this instance, it’s only the possibility of trouble. No trouble
has actually occurred yet. Plus they’ve only found themselves in trouble once
before. Plus Ethan and Liv have been together plenty of times without getting
into trouble. So Ethan’s statement is bizarre in its inaccuracies.
Ethan says he never told Marion
about the Arclight in the visions. But he had that vision a day or two ago and
this is the first time he’s seen Marion since then so of course he hadn’t told
Marion about the Arclight yet.
Talking about a frisky dream, Ethan
says, ‘All my dreams are that kind of dream, L. I’m almost 17.’ Surely you’ve
been having those kinds of dreams for far longer than that? Is 17 the magical
turns-you-horny age?
Ethan and Lena
Ethan
is being possessive over Lena and it’s a bit creepy, to be honest.
Within the space of a page, twice
there’s mention of the electricity that Ethan feels when he touches Lena. Both
times they were presented as new information which was rather lazy. Heat is
always a by-product of the couple’s interaction and then randomly a chandelier swings
wildly. Not only is this the only instance of movement but this is the only
instance of anything but heat being produced during their touching. This is a
lack of consistency.
The first one hundred and
thirty-four pages are spent Ethan whining that it’s not the same between him
and Lena. It doesn’t feel like much is happening, with no sense of suspense to
justify the delay. So one could rightly perceive this as padding. Yet this
makes the reader feel exactly how Ethan is feeling: lost. So this long delay in
plot could equally be terrible writing or brilliant writing.
Lena spends a lot of energy and
emotional capital telling Ethan that John was just a friend. And yet in the
same breath she refuses to accept Liv as just a friend to Ethan. Come on.
Amma
Amma
spends this book being… peculiar.
We still have the occasional howler.
My favourite being, ‘You look like you fell into a cookie jar and couldn’t find
your way out.’ Fantastic. However, every other time Amma uses ‘into’, she says
‘inta’. This is the only time she says ‘into’. This mistake should have been
noticed by the editor.
Amma bangs her spoon, the One-Eyed
Menace, on the table which breaks a spell. We never see the One-Eyed Menace is
a magical context ever again. Ethan does steal the spoon but he does nothing
with it. He doesn’t even think about
it. We don’t see it again. So why bother showing the readers he stole it?
Olivia
Olivia
is an English Keeper-in-Training.
It’s really refreshing for the
cleverest character to also be funny. Not only that but she’s the funniest
character. She calls one person a prat and then calls herself a genius, with
neither shame nor pretence. When Link tells Ethan off for not telling him Liv
was ‘hot’, she replied, ‘I find that rather tragic.’
She regularly picks up on everyone
else’s shit. Like when the boys say, ‘Ladies first’, Liv replies, ‘Men only say
that when it’s something horrible or dangerous.’
I know it’s stereotypical but I really
connected with Olivia over tea. At one point she says, ‘Tea is meant to be hot,
sir.’ My soul curdles with the thought of intentionally drinking cold tea.
There’s one thing about Liv I don’t
like: instead of ‘Caronlina’, she’s written as saying ‘Carolin-er’. No.
American accents have a rhotic R and most English accents do not, so ‘runner’
would be ‘run-urrr’ and ‘run-uh’ respectively. But just because English accents
turn ‘er’ into ‘uh’ sounds doesn’t mean it turns ‘uh’ sounds into ‘er’ sounds.
Otherwise we’d be saying ‘peet-zurrr’ for ‘pizza’. So for the authors to say
Olivia say, ‘CArolin-er’ has no basis in fact. (We know Liv has a Standard English accent from other
characters’ perceptions of her speech, meaning she doesn’t have a rhotic R.)
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