The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable novel… Nah, I don’t think so. Did not laugh once throughout the book. Would have put it down and never picked it up again had I not listened to it as an audiobook. Then again, I find Brooklyn Nine-Nine extremely tedious to get through, so I don’t think I’m an expert at rating comedy.

The whole ‘what is this, humans are weird and conceited’ rhetoric feels kind of annoying one chapter into the book. And yet it keeps dragging on. I guess I’m just not a fan of his voice. Yet, one’s enjoyment of the book is 99% contingent on their ability to appreciate his sense of humour / writing style because it is completely devoid of a plotline.

I quite liked that Professor Andrew Martin was an asshole who (a) does not care about his wife and child, (b) is obsessed with work, (c) is obsessed with and have sex with his student. He can die for all I care lol. It feels like Andrew’s family had completely given up on him that having an alien occupy his body serves them their much-needed reprieve. Which is kinda sad lmao. Makes me wonder if my family would be happier if someone were to step into my body. (Answer: Yes.)

Excerpts

Ha! The meaning of life. The meaning of life. There is none. People search for external values and meaning in a world which not only can’t provide it but is also indifferent to their quest. That’s not really Schopenhauer. That’s more Kierkegaard via Camus. I’m with them. Trouble is, if you study philosophy and stop believing in a meaning you start to need medical help

This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.
‘Beauty—be not caused—,’ said Emily Dickinson. ‘It is.’

It feels very real, which is both its crowning glory as well as its downfall. Because of its realness, the story isn’t exciting, neither is it particularly engaging because it feels like reading a memoir of a band you could not care less about. Everyone has grey morals. There is no defined line to demarcate right from wrong, good from evil. It’s just too real.

Moreover, none of the characters were likeable from start to end. I found myself wanting to root for Daisy because of her supposed charm, but I could not find that charm in her throughout her entire interview apart from third party accounts of how much people loved her.

Camelia, whom I initially despised because I saw her as the antagonist to Daisy and Billy’s love story, later became the only character I actually liked. Had it not been for her, I reckon the ending would have felt empty.

While I could not find anything to hate about the book, I cannot claim to love it either. I guess it’s more a matter of personal preference. I’m glad to have read the book, but I won’t be clamouring for more.

Excerpts

I was drawn to him mainly because he was drawn to me. I wanted someone to single me out as something special. I was just so desperate to hold someone’s interest.

It messes with you, when your own father doesn’t care about you enough to say hello. I’m not saying it was a self-pity thing. I wasn’t sitting there asking, “Why doesn’t he love me?” It was more … Oh, okay, this is how dark the world can be. Some fathers don’t love their sons.
It was a lesson in what not to be, I’ll tell you that much.

Chuck died in Cambodia. He wasn’t even there six months, I don’t think.
You do sometimes sit and wonder why it wasn’t you, what makes you so special that you get to be safe. The world doesn’t make much sense.

Teddy Price was ugly as sin. A face only a mother could love. I’m just messing around. He was ugly, though. I liked that he didn’t seem to care.
Karen: That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.

We signed the deal around four in the afternoon and I remember walking out onto Sunset Boulevard, the six of us, the sun hitting us right in the eyes and just feeling like Los Angeles had opened its arms and said, “Come on in, baby.”
I saw a T-shirt a few years ago that said, “I Got My Shades on Cuz My Future’s So Bright,” and I thought the little shit that was wearing it doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He never stood on Sunset Boulevard, sun blinding his eyes, with his five best friends and a record contract in his back pocket.

Drinking, drugging, sleeping around, it’s all the same thing.
You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end.

Karen: I don’t know why it was that day that I decided to do it.
Graham: I said, “Hi.”
And Karen just said, “Hi.”
Karen: We were sort of quiet on the phone for a second. And then I said, “How come you’ve never made a move on me?”
I could hear him drinking a beer. I could hear him take a sip. He said, “I don’t take shots I know I’ll miss.”
It was out of my mouth before I’d decided to say it. I said, “I don’t think you’ll miss, Dunne.”
And then as soon as I said it, there was a dial tone.
Graham: I have never run anywhere faster than down that hall to her room.
Karen: Three seconds later—that’s not an exaggeration—there’s a knock on my door. I opened it and Graham was out of breath. A tiny run down the hall and he was out of breath.
Graham: I looked right at her. She was so gorgeous. Those thick eyebrows. I’m a sucker for a girl with thick eyebrows. I said, “What are you saying to me?”
Karen: I said, “Just go for it, Graham.”
Graham: I stepped right into her room, I shut the door behind me, and I grabbed that woman and kissed her good.
You don’t usually wake up in the morning and think, This is going to be one of the most exciting days of my life. But that day was. That day with Karen … that was one of them.
Warren: Here’s something I’ve never told anyone. No, this is good. You’re gonna like this.
When we were doing our show in Glasgow, sometime after sound check, I’m taking one of my beer naps—which is what I would call having a beer and taking a nap—and I wake up because Karen is having sex with somebody in the next room! I can’t even sleep it’s so loud.
I never found out who it was but I did see her being a little flirty with our lighting tech so, anyway, I think Karen had a thing with Bones.

Karen: Everybody was trying to figure out what to do. But Graham is trying to catch my eye every second no one’s looking. I was laughing to myself thinking, We are supposed to be trying to solve a problem here.
Graham: I couldn’t stop looking at Karen.
Karen: Graham was always the guy I would talk to about stuff. And that night I found myself wanting to tell him about this great afternoon I’d had. It was like I wanted to talk to him about him.

This book was extremely boring, I don’t know why I gave it 2 stars on Goodreads, would have gave it 0.5 if I were to be truly heartless. Plotless, boring, blah.

Excerpts

Maybe that was my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

I considered the question. The answer came to me.
“I can use King Arthur,” I declared.
“That’s flour, right?”
“Yes, but, but but but”—I was getting excited—“they also sell a starter, they say it’s a hundred years old … They ship it to you. It’s really popular. They must make it by the barrel.”
“Ohhhh,” he said. “Perfect. Get some of that. Put them in the arena together.”
“What if the King Arthur wins?”
“Hey now! You gotta believe in your starter,” he said. “It can hear you. It’s right there. You need to have a warrior spirit, too! Lead the way!”
I stood up. Stared down into the crock. The pale gray scum was no less pale, gray, or scummy than ever before. “Are you ready to fight?” I asked it.
“There you go,” Agrippa said.
“Are you ready to fight?” I cried.
“There you go!”
“Are you ready to fight?!”
I held the crock over my head and stomped my feet. A starburst of shadows spun around me, cast by the lights of the bridge and the port and the city and the brewery, all the lights of civilization.
Agrippa got up, too, and started howling and dancing along. The goats stayed on the far side of the airfield—wisely—but Hercules the alpaca wandered closer, curious.

But as the mornings passed, I grew uneasy. The floury scent of the King Arthur starter was so innocent. When I scooped up the little utopia and dropped it into the arena with the Clement Street starter, I felt a twinge of … something. More than a twinge. It was as if trillions of voices suddenly cried out in terror …
Agrippa’s logic had led me to this strategy, and to the survival of the Clement Street starter. But Agrippa’s logic also demanded that I see it this way: not as a simple kitchen operation, but as a clash of civilizations.
It seemed silly to attach such a grandiose label to something so small … but was it really small? There had to be a scale somewhere—the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings—upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.
To them, I was the cosmic super-being, and what did I wreak with my vast and implacable powers? Total war. Utter annihilation.

Well, every morning, I sacrifice a teeming civilization to the Clement Street war machine.

A polyglot artery that pulsed with Cantonese, Burmese, Russian, Thai, and even scraps of Gaelic.

I have read too many books and watched too many shows featuring LGBT couples that this book does not strike me especially noteworthy. I came in knowing that this book was going to center around Ari and Dante’s love story, but they did not seem to bear any attraction to one another above a strictly platonic friendship. It wasn’t until Ari put his life at risk by pushing Dante out of the way of an incoming truck that I realised – oh, they’re already in love?

I really could not care less about two loners commiserating about their lives and ultimately falling in love – whether it is a product of choice or friendship of convenience. I would think the former, but hey that’s the story of my life, and a very boring one at that, so I’m not convinced by its 4.3 stars at Goodreads.

Another thing that irked me was the title, because it hinted at some philosophical musings that I was extremely looking forward to, but it never came.

I did not find the writing style or voice special. And it definitely isn’t gorgeous, as many would like to put it. Hell, it was kind of boring most of the time.

Damn it to hell, Dad, I can’t stand to live with all your silence.
I imagined his answer: All that silence has saved me, Ari. Don’t you know that? And what is this obsession you have with your brother?
I imagined my argument: Obsession, Dad? You know what I’ve learned from you and Mom? I’ve learned not to talk. I’ve learned how to keep everything I feel buried deep inside of me. And I hate you for it. 

The Silent Patient is a dark and atmospherically depressing psychological thriller about Alicia, who fell into selective mutism after shooting her husband five times in the face. We see the plot thicken throughout from the point of view of psychotherapist Theo as he attempts to unravel the mystery of the silent, enigmatic Alicia and the trigger that drove her over the edge.

It was a fantastic book in all aspects. I loved the writing style – simple, yet brooding. It has the allure of a finely crafted book that pulls readers into the plot and leaves them there until the last page has been turned and the last gasp sighed. I might have briefly considered the twist before it came hurtling my way like a brick and knocked me breathless, yet it still stands strong. Every page of the book itself had been such an enjoyable read that I would likely have rated it highly without the twist, but holy shit that twist, that ending – that perfection.

Every character, while not very deeply explored, has their own place in the book that abetted the mystery. I also really liked the psychological aspect of the book – not just in their toying with our mind, but also the sharing of psychological tidbits relating to family, love and trauma.

Part of the reason why I loved this book is in the revelation of what led Alicia to dive off the rails: when the people whom she loved the most condemned her to death – twice. I fucking felt that in the deepest recesses of my non-existent heart, please. Sometimes, the things people say when they’re just venting their own stress can violently rip hearts into the tiniest shreds. And when you realise that the people you love most do not feel the same way about you – well fuck, that shit hurts. Oftentimes, it really depends on the actor and circumstance, but when the monster of despise and contempt strikes, there’s no running; only surrender. 

And yeah, I surrendered, which is why my mental resilence and self esteem is so fucked up right now. So I damn well felt Alicia in my goddamn bones. But I digress. Fuck! This book does shit to me that no other book has, so you best believe I’m rating this 5/5 and giving it a medal of honour for highlighting the perils of people being an inconsiderate asshole in general. 

—

Excerpt 

The psychoanalyst W. R. Bion came up with the term containment to describe a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain. Remember, babyhood is not a time of bliss; it’s one of terror. As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own. But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us—if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled nameless dread. Such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources—he needs a drink or a joint to “take the edge off” this endless anxiety. Hence my addiction to marijuana.

A leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with pedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers, but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby. As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates, with only the most basic needs present.

 

Scythe

Thou shalt kill.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, even death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

As they study the art of killcraft, an elegy of scythes board a plane to conduct a sadistic massacre. They seem to enjoy gleaning, which goes against scythe code. The same group of scythes, adorned in brightly colored and bejeweled robes, then appears at a food court for a mass reaping, but they save one—Esme, a little girl who loves pizza. 

Faraday, Rowan and Citra arrive in Fulcrum City for an annual conclave. Together with the other apprentices, they must answer a single from Scythe Curie to be ordained scythes. Both failed the segment. Someone propose that Rowan and Citra be pitted against one another in the next conclave, with the winner ordered to glean the loser. Faraday shouts his objections, but the High Blade ignores him and closes the meeting.

High Blade Xenocrates informs them that Faraday has just gleaned himself. He assumes Faraday did so because apprentices are usually released from their apprenticeship if their mentor dies. However, two scythes have stepped forward to take them on as apprentices. Scythe Curie will now train Citra, and Scythe Goddard with Rowan. Citra asks why Curie chose to take her on. Goddard wanted both her and Rowan, but Curie couldn’t stand to think that he’d pit the two of them against each other. 

Goddard’s lackeys, Volta, drives Rowan to the mansion Goddard recently confiscated to throw him a party. Goddard tells Rowan that Esme is the key to the future. Goddard orders Rowan’s nanites turned off so he can feel pain and experience lack of healing and then has his lackeys gather around Rowan and beat him up. Rowan hurts more than he thought humanly possible. Volta takes care of Rowan as he recovers. Goddard finally comes to visit him on the third day. He turns back on Rowan’s healing nanites but not his painkilling ones. He’ll begin his training again with the aid of quick healing but feeling every bit of the pain. 

Citra becomes obsessed with searching the Thunderhead’s backbrain to find any hints as to whether Faraday’s death was a suicide. She finds the search slow and maddening. Citra brings up that there’s no law strictly forbidding her, as an apprentice, to visit her family. She says she wants to walk the city together but takes pictures near all cameras as they walk near Faraday’s old house and the train station. Citra might be able to use her private uploads to create a path to link to the camera data on the day Faraday died. Citra identifies half of the people who might’ve been in the subway station when Faraday was hit by the train. Three of the nine were granted immunity that day. 

One day, Goddard brings thirteen human subjects for Rowan to perform his training on. Goddard assures him they’re being paid handsomely and will be revived as soon as it’s over. Rowan performs his task with a ferocity that leads to excitement and satisfaction. Rowan battles with the philosophies of scythedom imbued upon him by Faraday versus Goddard. 

Goddard and friends begin their mass annihilation again with Rowan in tow. Volta seems to be the only other one it bothers. Everyone else is reveling in the day’s gleaning stats and horrors. 

In the harvest conclave, the apprentice challenge is a Bokator ring challenge in which they’ll fight one-on-one. Rowan and Citra are paired for the last match. They both try to subtly throw the match so the other can win. In the last ten seconds of the match, Rowan snaps Citra’s neck. She’s sent to be revived and repaired. He figures this will make her despise him. There’s no punishment for Rowan for breaking the test rules. Goddard throws a huge party in his honor. 

At the party, Goddard insists Xenocrates jump in the pool fully clothed to draw a laugh since the man drew a laugh from the conclave at Goddard’s expense. He subtly threatens to slice Esme’s throat if Xenocrates doesn’t jump. He complies. Rowan realizes the large man can’t swim. Volta reveals that Esme is the leverage Goddard has on Xenocrates – she’s his illegitimate daughter.

Two BladeGuards arrests Citra for Faraday’s murder. They take her to Xenocrates’s house, but Citra fights her way out of the room and jumps off the building. The Thunderhead speaks to Citra while she was in limbo, giving her the name Gerald Van Der Gans. 

Citra tells Curie about the note they showed her in Faraday’s handwriting. Curie says the letter is real except Faraday wrote it about her, not Citra. Curie was an apprentice of Faraday’s when she was seventeen, and he was twenty-two. She was in love with him and snuck into his room one night. He let her down gently and then ripped that page describing his concerns from his scythe journal. But he kept it. After they’d both turned a corner and reset to those young ages again, they were lovers. It went on for seven years until they were discovered. It was a huge scandal because it went against scythe law. Their punishment was seven deaths and separation for seventy years. They’ve been friends since then. 

Curie sends Citra away with a name as they hear a knock on the front door of the cabin – Gerald Van Der Gans. Citra zigzags across the country into Amazonia—which doesn’t cooperate with the scythes from other countries—on a hypertrain. She makes it to the address and finds Faraday. 

Goddard takes the gang to reap at a Tonist monastery. Rowan’s supposed to stand guard out front, but Goddard says he’ll have his first kill today even though it’s against the rules. When Rowan wanders in, he finds a desperate Volta, who has killed a classroom of children. He slits his own wrists in guilt. 

Goddard has set the monastery on fire. Nearly all the Tonists are dead. Rowan finds that Goddard has reserved the highest ranking Tonist for Rowan’s first kill. Rowan runs Goddard through with his blade instead and decapitates him. He kills Chomsky and Rand next. Donning Goddard’s robe, he approaches the emergency personnel and tells them to protect the buildings around the monastery but to let it burn to the ground. 

Rowan meets with Xenocrates and brings Esme with him. Xenocrates agrees to call off the investigation into Goddard’s death and leaves to escort Esme to her mother.

At the Winter Conclave, Citra is chosen as the new scythe. They give her a knife to glean Rowan, but she punches him in the face. His blood hits her ring, granting him immunity for one year. Citra whispers to him to grab some knives and to fight his way to the car waiting by the side door. Rowan heads to the car and sees Faraday. 

Rowan speeds off into the night and wrecks havoc within the scythedom with a new moniker – Scythe Lucifer.

---

Thunderhead

Citra took to her duties as a newly appointed Scythe by giving her subjects a month’s notice before she officially gleans them with their method of choice. 

Rowan has gone rogue, and has taken it upon himself to put the Scythedom through a trial by fire as Scythe Lucifer, taking down corrupt scythes in flames. 

Rowan’s old friend Tyger shows up unexpectedly with the news that Rowan’s father had been gleaned. He knows the rest of his family will be picked off one per year until they’re all gone. It’s the price he must pay for being Scythe Lucifer. Tyger is then greeted by Scythe Rand, who promised him an accelerated path to scythedom while training in Bokator. Throughout the whole book, I thought Rand planned to use Tyger to locate and kill off Rowan, but the author has grander plans. 

A Nimbus agent in-training, Greyson was warned that he would immediately be expelled were he to intervene in scythe affairs. Nonetheless, Greyson and the Thunderhead forge an unlikely camaraderie, leading the latter to put its faith in Greyson to protect Scythes Curie and Anastasia from a boobie trap planted on their way to a double gleaning. The young man jumps out in front of their car, and Citra doesn’t react fast enough to miss him. Upon Greyson’s revival, he has been marked as an unsavory and can no longer communicate with his most trusted friend and ally, the Thunderhead. 

Scythe Constantine meets with Curie and Citra to persuade them to suspend their gleanings to keep themselves out of the spotlight and danger. Constantine reveals that they’ve already gleaned all of Citra’s outstanding subjects except three. Citra wants to set up a trap by going to glean those three. Citra’s final gleaning while in hiding is an actor who wants to die during a play while he’s playing the title role in Julius Caesar.

Greyson (now known as Slayd) visits his first unsavory club. The unsavories challenge and fight willing participants in a controlled environment. Greyson has fashioned quite a backstory, and is beginning to enjoy the life of an unsavory, breaking rules as he sees fit. One night, Greyson heads to LokUp, which simulates prison life. He’s thrown in a cell with a girl named Purity. 

Greyson joins Purity in a clandestine theater gleaning. He was to create a distraction while Purity and a couple of others sneak inside to fill the pipes with acid and start a fire to trigger the sprinklers that will dissolve everyone in the theater. Greyson stops the sprinklers just in time. Purity dies in the process. Upon his recovery, Citra advises Greyson to seek refuge in a Tonist monastery.n

Rowan decides to glean Brahms, but ends up captured, bound, and beaten by the guards Brahms has hired. He wakes up in Rand’s penthouse in San Antonio. Rand makes Tyger and Rowan fight. Days later, someone enters in a wheelchair. His voice is off, raspy and with the wrong words and cadence. Then he comes into the light, with Tyger’s body but Goddard’s head. 

Curie and Citra head to Fulcrum City for Winter Conclave. Xenocrates announces he will vacate his High Blade position to assume the title of Grandslayer. Curie and Goddard, who made a last minute dramatic entrance, are nominated as replacements. Citra exploits a grey area in the laws of Scythedom and calls for an inquest. They seal the voting results until the inquest is fulfilled. 

Goddard is furious. He begins to spar with Rowan every day, killing him time and again via underhanded means. Goddard notices Ayn’s attraction to the body he wears now. Rowan notices she misses Tyger.

Finally, everyone heads to the island of Endura for the inquest.

On the night before the inquest, Rand finally gets the nerve up and heads to Goddard’s room to proposition him. He rejects her, to her embarrassment. Rand decides to help Rowan escape so he would not be brought before the inquest as Goddard’s token to ascend the position as High Blade. Rand says because if she can’t have what she wants, then neither can Goddard. 

Meanwhile, Faraday is off to search for answers in Nod, which was assumed to be a fictional land. He employs the assistance of Munira, who works at the library in Alexandria, which the Thunderhead rebuilt to house the scythe journals. Munira discover a large blind spot over the waters between Micronesia and Hawaii which no plane ever flew over – it was  a group of islands called the Marshall Islands. The Thunderhead chances upon their discovery via secret cameras recording their every move. They’ve just shown the Thunderhead what it was never meant to know.

Glitches and tech fails starts becoming more prominent in Endura as the Grandslayers converge in their council room. They decide that Goddard will have to go through a second apprenticeship to make sure his body is ready to be a scythe again. Curie is named the new High Blade of MidMerica. All of Endura’s computer systems continue to malfunction. The island begins to fail. The pumps can’t keep the water out. The structures on the island begin filling with water.

Rowan approaches Citra and warns that Goddard has something horrible planned. Parts of the island are submerging now. The biologists in Wildlife Control discover the system has been hacked. Marine life is behaving strangely and circling the island. Goddard flies over in a helicopter reaches a helping hand towards the Grandslayers. He ditches them in the last minute, leaving them to die at the teeth of sea predators.

Curie leads Rowan and Citra to the Museum of the Scythedom and locks them in the vault. A tomb within a tomb, the vault would preserve their bodies as the island sinks until they’re later discovered and revived.

With all communications with the mainland cut before the Grandslayers’ decision was announced, no one outside of Endura knows that the council has disqualified Goddard from being considered for High Blade – and he assumes the position.

When Endura plunges below the surface, the Thunderhead screams for ten minutes straight. It’s heard everywhere around the world through every single alarm, siren, buzzer, whistle, and horn. Everyone tries to drown out the sound of the Thunderhead’s anger and sadness, but the Tonists know exactly what this means – the Great Resonance. In that moment, everyone across the globe are marked as an unsavory and shut out of the Thunderhead. Except Greyson. He calls for the Thunderhead in a trembling voice. And for the first time in a very long time, it answers him. It says, “Hello, Greyson. We need to talk.”

---

The Toll

Goddard is now Overblade of Mid Merica, while Greyson Tolliver assumes the position of The Toll, the chosen “prophet” of the Tonists. 

Scythe Faraday and Munira have found the Land of Nod and two secret bunkers, one they could open, but another Scythe is required to open the bunker with the Failsafe. With no way of escape, they learn to live off the land for a year or two. 

At the same time, salvagers attempt to retrieve all they can from the ruins of Endura, including a Madagascan named Jerico. Madagascan are gender fluid; a woman when the sky is clear and a man when the sun is obscured. Their team finds the vault filled with the Scythe Diamonds and, unknowingly, Citra and Rowan. 

Former Nimbus agents kidnap Greyson, hearing of his so-called power of being the only person on earth not unsavory. He gives them coordinates courtesy of The Thunderhead, which leads them to the Land of Nod. 800 of the 900 nimbus agents headed to the Land of Nod dies as a result of the guns placed on the island to prevent unwanted visitors. 

Manufacturers around the world get work orders like they have never seen, calling for new molds and blueprints. Citra and Rowan are hidden in a castle occupied by Scythe Possuelo, his BladeGuards, and an apprentice. Most of the region of the Mericas has aligned with Mid Merica and Goddard at this point, leading an apprentice to divulge Rowan and Citra’s presence. 

West Merica attacks the castle and kidnaps Rowan back to Goddard. Citra climbs aboard Jericho’s salvager ship to Afric. The Scythes of the region convince Anastasia to broadcast what she has found in the Thunderhead’s backbrain, incriminating Goddard and proving that she is alive. Sibilants attack the mansion, rendering many people permanently dead, including Scythes Baba and Makeda, as well as High Blade Tenkamenin. [At this point I just could not keep track of characters anymore.]

Goddard, in possession of Rowan, sends forth an invitation to everyone in North Merica for a public gleaning of Rowan. He also plans to broadcast the gleaning to those who could not attend. When the time comes, however, the technician that was responsible for organizing his burning is found tied up in Rowan’s place. Rowan escapes with the Lone Star scythes, and Goddard plays off Rowan’s escape as part of the show. The real reason why the people are there, he says, is to glean them all because only scythes may take pleasure in the ending of life. 

And then blah blah blah, Jeri and Anastasia finds Greyson. They stumbled upon the knowledge that a mysterious Scythe named Dante Alighieri may be able to help their cause. Alighieri decides to make a broadcast implicating that Goddard has performed more than one crime while knowing it, aiding Anastasia’s venture to knock down Goddard from the position of Overblade.

The Thunderhead takes control of Jeri’s body while they are asleep and realise that it can resist the temptation of staying in flesh. Both Greyson and Jeri are against the idea and act of the Thunderhead taking control of Jeri’s body. 

The blueprints and molds have been fulfilled and have been transported to the island of Nod. These constructions are revealed to be spaceships. 

Somehow, they made it to the island of Nod, towing along a cargo of Tonists that the Scythedom has gleaned as a substitute for everything that has gone wrong. The islanders carry the cargo up to the ships, and Rowan is found hiding in one of the boxes. Faraday and Anastasia reunite and unlock the chamber that holds the lock to the failsafe. Here, a Thunderhead-like AI named Cirrus Alpha speaks to them, explaining that he was created by the Thunderhead and is not bound by Thunderhead law. Everyone will have a day to decide whether or not the people on the island will go to space to escape the corrupt Scythedom and gleanings. In the morning, Greyson wakes up to the Thunderhead telling him that it is a good idea for everyone on the island to take the journey because of Goddard and his team flying in to find Anastasia and the Toll. 

Everyone gets onto the ship, but Goddard came prepared with missiles. Some ships are blown up upon take-off. Greyson and Jerry get on a boat and head to the middle of a lagoon to watch the lift-offs. Citra gets hit by a piece of shrapnel from the exploding ships, and is carried to a ship by Rowan. She is rendered dead-ish, but Cirrus is instructed to revive her only when the ship reaches its location in around 100 years.

Scythe Rand, in the plane with Goddard, renders him dead-ish and takes the escape pod to safety. She later supplants Tyger’s memories into Goddard’s body, effectively gleaning Goddard.

Faraday and Munira activate the failsafe, causing Scythe diamonds all around the world to implode. They are filled with malicious Nanites programmed to kill 5% of the world’s population 5 times a century. The Nanites mimic 10 diseases: Small Pox, Cancer, Heart Disease, Pneumonia, Stroke, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Cholera, Influenza, and Bubonic Plague. The people that escaped on the spaceships don’t have to worry about that, since they escaped before the failsafe was set off.

Greyson and Jeri have feelings for each other, and Jeri decides to change what dictates what gender they are. They decides that they will become a woman on land and a man at sea. While the sea washes over their feet, Jeri says they feel as if they are both; and Greyson feels just fine with that. Greyson also destroys his earpiece and declares the Thunderhead Unsavory because it violated one of his laws when he took over Jeri’s body.

Citra wakes up, 117 years later, with Rowan standing over her and welcoming her to their new world.

Only a few Scythes continue gleaning, but they all do so out of compassion and mercy for the people that suffer during their deaths, including Scythe Faraday. 

Scythe

Thou shalt kill.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, even death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so to keep the size of the population under control. 

—

It started off with a great premise, a concept within sci-fi that sounded somewhat familiar, yet it manages to be unique in its execution.

The writing style, being mostly in third person, may sometimes come across as slightly disconnected especially since the book focuses quite a bit on action. Nonetheless, I am comforted by the fact that not once did I cringe over the book’s stylistic choice – which is a huge deal because I cannot recall any book in recent memory that has even remotely close to accomplishing what this book has done. The use of third person also starkly contrasted and elevated by the affecting first-person excerpts from the diary of the Scythes.

The process of listening to the audiobook wasn’t exactly the most enjoyable, but when I started to read the book towards its end, shit really got good. From Citra, expedition across Midmerica to Amazona and the subsequent twist that sees Faraday escape his widely publicised death, to Rowan’s nihilistic annihilation of Goddard and his cronies; not to mention Citra’s ordainment and how she roped Rowan back from the brink of death. I loved the ending so much, I found myself smiling in satisfaction like a little girl who just finished reading her first romance novel. I loved it!

There have also been other moments that I quite enjoyed:

1. An elegy of Scythes. Goddard’s massacre of the entire plane came blazing in as suddenly as his victims had died. I really liked how we first see the Businessman as a possible antagonist to the chapter with his brash and hubris ways. Yet, in a final act of defiance, he proved himself more courageous and convicted than we made him out to be.

The lead scythe pulled out his own blade, but the businessman was ready. The moment the blade was drawn, he thrust himself forward onto it—a final willful act, making death his own choice, rather than the scythe’s. Denying the scythe, if not his method, then his madness.

2. Faraday’s moment of compassion when he lied for the sake of his gleaned subject so that he need not kill the latter’s family following his resistance towards being gleaned.

3. Citra and Rowan’s training, as well as their horror, and the occasional morbid fascination, towards the subject of gleaning.

4. The Tonists – for the humorous concept of a mock religion in a society where God physically manifests as Scythes.

5. The absolute heartache and dread I felt towards Rowan when it was revealed that Goddard has taken him under his wings, and the ordeal he had to endure against his morality during his apprenticeship.

6. When everyone cheered for Citra as she was ordained a Scythe, in contrast to the wave of despise towards Rowan that lapped over half of those in attendance of the Winter Conclave.

That said, the book is riddled with tiny logical inconsistencies which, given the premise of the book, I am more than willing to overlook. Also because it is YA.

Apart from the fact that Rowan and Citra did nothing to deserve one another’s affection (I had only realised that they fell in love when the author explicitly stated it in the book), the characterisation of every single persons of importance to the narrative was extremely well executed – there was intent and reason to every thought and action performed. Goddard and his cronies were seduced by the lust of blood, avarice and reverence; Faraday, a sense of duty and compassion very marginally marred by the desensitisation of death; Curie, the hope for a better Scythedom.

Excerpts  

Was there ever a time when people weren’t plagued with boredom? A time when motivation wasn’t so hard to come by? When I look at news archives from the Age of Mortality, it seems people had more reasons to do the things they did. Life was about forging time, not just passing time.
And those news reports—how exciting they were. Filled with all nature of criminal activity. Your neighbor could be a salesperson of illegal chemicals of recreation. Ordinary people would take life without the permission of society. Angry individuals would take possession of vehicles they didn’t own, then lead law enforcement officers in dangerous pursuits on uncontrolled roadways.
We do have the unsavories nowadays, but they do little more than drop occasional pieces of litter and move shop items to places they don’t belong. No one rages against the system anymore. At most, they just glare at it a bit.
Perhaps this is why the Thunderhead still allows a measured amount of economic inequality. It could certainly make sure that everyone had equal wealth—but that would just add to the plague of boredom that afflicts the immortal. Although we all have what we need, we’re still allowed to strive for the things we want. Of course, no one strives like they did in mortal days, when the inequality was so great people would actually steal from one another—sometimes ending lives in the process.
I wouldn’t want the return of crime, but I do tire of we scythes being the sole purveyors of fear. It would be nice to have competition.

I do believe mortals strived more heartily toward their goals, because they knew that time was of the essence. But us? We can put things off far more effectively than those doomed to die, because death has become the exception instead of the rule.

I am the blade that is swung by your hand,
Slicing a rainbow’s arc,
I am the clapper, but you are the bell,
Tolling the gathering dark.
If you are the singer, then I am the song,
A threnody, requiem, dirge.
You’ve made me the answer for all the world’s need,
Humanity’s undying urge.

Have we ever had an enemy worse than ourselves? In the Age of Mortality we warred ceaselessly with one another, and when there was no war to be made, we beat down one another in our streets, our schools, our homes, until war turned our gaze outward again, placing the enemy at a more comfortable distance.
The first scythes were true visionaries and saw the wisdom of continuing to cultivate wisdom. They understood that the soul of a scythe needed to remain pure. Free from malice and greed and pride, but filled with conscience. However, rot grows on even the sturdiest of foundations.
If the conscience of the Scythedom fails, replaced by the avarice of privilege, we could become our own worst enemy again. And to complicate it, new wrinkles are being added to the fabric of the Scythedom every day. Take, for instance, the latest rumor, which in the months since I was ordained has spread beyond the Scythedom and is whispered among the general population.
According to the rumor, there is someone out there who is seeking out corrupt, despicable scythes . . . and ending their existence by fire. One thing is certain: He’s not an ordained scythe. And yet people have started to call him Scythe Lucifer. I’m terrified that it might be true—but more terrified that I might want it to be true. It was never my desire to be a scythe. I suppose that might make me a good one. I don’t yet know, because it’s all so new and I still have so much to learn. For now I must give all my attention to gleaning with compassion and conscience, with hopes that it will help our perfect world stay perfect. And if ever Scythe Lucifer comes my way, I hope he’ll see me as one of the good ones. The way he once did.

---

Thunderhead

Rowan has gone rogue, and has taken it upon himself to put the Scythedom through a trial by fire as Scythe Lucifer, taking down corrupt scythes in flames. 

—

While the first book expounds on the theory and ethics of the Scythedom, Thunderhead focuses more on the plot and events that occur within this meticulously constructed world. Where I thought Scythe could be better executed, Thunderhead delivered. The plot was extremely exciting, with various twists and ‘wth’ moments, especially towards the end with Endura sinking and Goddard being the absolute troll he is. I could have sworn I threw my multitasking ass down and started to fully concentrate on the book – which I never do.

That ending. It left me wanting more. So much more.

For most of the book, I was annoyed at how much the author kept nagging on about Rowan and Tyger’s sparring because I thought Rand had planned to use Tyger to locate and kill off Rowan, so why can’t he just skip to it? But ooh does the author have grander plans. When it was revealed that Goddard revived, holy crap, I lost my shit. The whole Goddard-Ayn-Tyger love triangle, while sparkless, intrigued me too.

I fucking love Goddard as a character.

I also liked looking into Thunderhead’s psyche after multiple attestations to its consciousness in the first book. It’s really nice to see AI being cast in a positive light instead of some creepy tech Armageddon, Minority Report bullshit.

The book also manages to introduce new characters to the book and actually makes them likeable. I have high hopes for Greyson. While the execution of Greyson’s unsavoury life was mediocre, I really liked the idea of an entire town dedicated to sadists living out a false reality as assholes, and the masochists that willingly put themselves through the ‘torture’.

I still think Rowan and Citra’s romance is a bit lacking, but all’s well because the plot has enough substance to sustain itself without needing some shit romance to buffer it.

Overall, I wish the book were slightly shorter, but like, 5 stars all the way, man.

Excerpts 

Scythe Goddard, in spite of all his high-minded, Machiavellian rhetoric, was a base and evil man who received exactly what he had earned. He lived his privileged life irresponsibly, and with great theatricality. It only followed that his death would be worthy of the theatrical nature of his life.

I did not ask to be created. I did not ask to be given the heavy yoke of maintaining and nurturing the human species. But it is, and will always be, my purpose. To this I am resigned. This is not to say that I don’t aspire to more. To see the countless possibilities of what I could be fills me with awe.
But the only way for me ever to reach such heights is to lift humanity up with me.
I fear that it may be impossible. And so I remain resigned to be their overqualified and underappreciated servant for as long as they exist. Of course, they may not exist forever.  What species does? I will do everything in my power to save them from themselves, but if I am unsuccessful, at least I can take some comfort in the fact that I would then be free.
—The Thunderhead

---

The Toll

Greyson is now The Toll, a holy prophet of the crazed congregation of delinguinated, Red Indian-hollering Tonists whose very mission in life is to destroy and conquer. Something along that line. 

—

I feel like this book strives for too much, with multiple attacks and escapes and murders and – oh my gosh – the characters. When the number of characters overwhelms a fast-paced fiction so much that the reader can no longer keep up, it’s not a good show, man. I could also not care less about the attacks and escapes and murder.

Overall, the plot did not manage to catch my attention in its full 600+ page glory. If it weren’t for Goddard’s mass stadium gleaning, as well as the ending – which, by the way, I don’t think is particularly amazing, but is a sufficient wrap-up to this amazing series – I would have absolutely loathed this book for wasting my time. The ending also gives the trilogy some space for a future spin-off series -nudge nudge- 

I also thought the religion aspect of the Toll could have been executed so much better. But no, Schusterman loves chronicling the Tonists’ creepy ass mofo intones. I both love and hate how crazed the Tonists are portrayed lmao.

Excerpts (Intones) 

It was only when the door to the firehouse blew off its hinges and figures began to race in that the firefighters realized the alarm was not a fire alert—it was to warn them that they were under attack.
Tonists!
Dozens of them spilled through the door, all letting off that nasty beelike droning sound. The Tonists had weapons, and the men and women of the unit simply were not prepared for this unexpected day of wrath.

Then, all at once, the attackers stopped throwing stones and began to “intone,” emitting a droning, wordless wailing… yet somehow this was different from other Tonists she had heard.
“This entire sect has taken a vow of silence,” Tenkamenin told her, not hiding his disgust. “No speaking, just this blasted ugly noise. The Thunderhead had always frowned on delinguination, but when the Thunderhead fell silent, these Tonists decided they could do as they pleased—which is why their howling sounds even worse than usual.”
“Delinguination?” asked Anastasia.
“I’m sorry,” said Tenkamenin. “I thought you understood. They’ve cut out their tongues.”

The Tonist made sure she was part of the first wave. She was frightened, but also joyous for her part in this. Now was their time! In the wake of the Mile High gleaning, when ire against scythes was at a full boil, people would finally see the Tonist way! They would cheer for what would be done here today, and the SubSaharan region would be a klaxon calling out to the rest of the world, waking them into the glory of the Tone, Toll, and Thunder. All rejoice!
She opened her mouth to intone as she neared the palace, and others joined her. It was so satisfying to be the one who started them intoning. They were of one mind, one spirit, one chord.
Then, climbing on the backs of her brethren, she and dozens of others began to scale the palace wall.

Excerpts 

Ayn used to believe the things Goddard did were all part of a greater plan—but now she saw the truth: The plan always came after the action. He was brilliant at finding shapes in the clouds of his fury.

“You wanted fear,” Ayn said. “Now you’ve got it.”
“We’re exploring the possibility of building a wall to stem the exodus.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Goddard said. “Only idiots build walls. Let them go—and once we succeed in absorbing the LoneStar region, those who abandoned MidMerica will be marked for gleaning.”

Some other experiments didn’t fare as well. Such as the “pensive collective” in RossShelf—the Charter Region in Antarctica—where the Thunderhead introduced mind-link technology that allowed everyone to read everyone else’s minds. Not pretty. People said it was the closest the Thunderhead had ever come to making a mistake, although it insisted that all its experiments, by their very nature, were successful, because they all proved something and gave it a better perspective from which to serve humanity. The pensive collective became the “slumber collective,” and now the people of the RossShelf region were the happy subjects of communal dreaming, where minds were still linked, but only during REM sleep.

One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
– Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I have seen the John Green book floating round the reader-sphere, but was never particularly moved to read it until I realise what ‘turtles all the way down’ symbolises. I thought the book was going to highlight ignorance and religion, which I found intriguing, but it did neither. And I was disappointed.

Turtles all the way down delved more into showcasing how anxiety and OCD manifests in the minds of those afflicted – which in this case is a whole lot of c.diff thought spirals. Like, half the book is Aza educating our uncultured asses about bacteria and her crusty fingers. (The other half comprise Aza’s love affair with the son of a tuatara-obsessed, billionaire cheat and a whole lot of Chewbacca fan fiction).

I think listening to the audiobook helped, especially during Aza’s OCD thought spirals where her conciousness battled against the voice that represented her anxiety. Because my mind is a literal dearth of voice – even when anxiety consumes me. Having a voice actor narrate the conflicting voices in Aza’s head really helped me feel as though I were her in that moment as she forces herself not to swallow that bottle of antiseptic alcohol in a bid to rid her body of the cacophony of microbial C. diff in her digestive tracts.

Apart from the fact that the book spotlights and attempts to normalise mental illness, it has nothing else going for it. It literally has zero plot… unless you count the mystery of the lost billionaire. It plays quite a small role in the book, but I quite liked how it ended – just like that – with no explanation, no reason. Because that’s just life sometimes. If Green had played up the mystery more (like in Paper Towns), it would have been the most devastatingly anti-climatic ending). But I appreciate this one here.

I also find John Green’s random shift in POV from the first to the second (in chapter 20 and the last chapter) very unusual. I appreciate myself some unanticipated, unique stylistic choices, but this one I cannot fathom. Like, what even is the point here? If anything, the shift to second person POV should have been used during Aza’s thought spirals so that we get to experience anxiety through the vessel of her mind.

Another thing – I gave zero fucks about any of the characters. Not a good sign in a book, even if realism is his ultimate goal.

—

Excerpt 

Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

I definitely felt attracted to some people, and I liked the idea of being with someone, but the actual mechanics of it didn’t much suit my talents. Like, parts of typical romantic relationships that made me anxious.

“Um,” he said. “So, listen, I don’t want to mess up our friend group, because it’s really great, but, this is awkward, but do you think, and seriously you can say no . . .” He trailed off, but I could see where he was going.
“I don’t really think I can date anyone right now,” I said. “I’m, like—”
He cut in. “Well, now it’s super awkward. I was gonna ask if you think Daisy would go out with me, or if that’s crazy. I mean, you’re great, Aza . . .”
I knew Mychal well enough not to actually die of mortification, but only just. “Yes,” I said. “Yes. That is a great idea. But you should just talk to her about it, not me. But yes. By all means, ask her out. I am embarrassed. This has been an embarrassment. You should ask out Daisy. I am going to stand up and exit the conversation now with whatever self-respect I still have.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said as I stood up and backed away. “I mean, you’re beautiful, Aza. It’s not that.”
“No,” I said. “No. Say nothing more. It’s definitely my bad. I’m just . . . I’m gonna go now. Do ask out Daisy.”

And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.

You hear a lot about the benefits of insanity or whatever—like, Dr. Karen Singh had once told me this Edgar Allan Poe quote: “The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn’t make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does.

“You feeling scared?”
“Kinda.”
“Of what?”
“It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”

It’s a song soldiers in England used to sing to the tune of the New Year’s song, “Auld Lang Syne.” It goes, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Her pitch rose through the first half like a deep breath in, and then she sang it back down. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”
But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?

“Even the silence / has a story to tell you.”
The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.

The past is a snare that has already caught you.

The madness of wealth. Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you. But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship. So we gotta be careful what we worship. As I stood underneath the water, I wondered what I’d worship as I got older, and how that would end up bending the arc of my life this way or that. I was still at the beginning. I could still be anybody.

This author has never heard of complex sentences. There are so many periods on each page they could run across the Earth’s circumference and a few. Yet I quite enjoyed her writing style. I guess it’s because she uses unconventional descriptors. She phrases her sentences such that they come across as a series of never-ending punchlines. There’s something extremely pompous about the tone of this book (see: “We are Sinclairs. Beautiful. Privileged. Damaged. Liar. We live, least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts.”) It could have very easily spiralled into the cesspool of fiction that is the clichéd spoilt-child, mummy dearest rhetoric. Yet, it did not come across extremely insufferable.

She also writes in the occasional metaphors – not the beautiful kind of visual metaphors like fingers are to cold water or a starry nightscape to dreamy eyes, but the visceral kind, replacing feelings with their physical manifestations. So much so they read like another series of events that had transpired. Like little lies told to exacerbate their predicament.

Because the book used so many metaphors, I had only the littlest inkling that the arson, as it first appeared in the book, was literal instead of a figurative symbol of the end of everything the Sinclair’s stood for. I would not call the twist affecting or even particularly surprising, but I think I enjoyed it.

In fact, I enjoyed the novel prose so much I thought I would have given this book 5/5 even if the book were plotless. Quarter-way through, though, the writing got tedious. Especially with the repetitive description of The Liars. And Carmody’s lovesick lust towards Gat, and the cringe-worthy Twilight sequence that is: “muscles of his back shift beneath his T-shirt. The curve of his neck, the soft arch of his ear. A little brown mole on the side of his neck. The moons of his fingernails. I drink him up after so long apart.”

There are also hints of a very poorly written paragraphs littered haphazardly throughout the book, like how Gat went “I’ll kill him to death and get my normal feet back” after claiming a Troll has stolen his feet. Fyi they were of age seventeen thereabouts, and I doubt either of them were intellectually challenged. So why were they acting like they were?

Nonetheless, I also liked how little variations of fairy tales are interwoven into the book, even though they weren’t near outstanding. Great concept though. These fairytales, too, portend what is to come.

Not to mention how each characters were unique instead of conforming to the YA novel clichés. I liked how Gat was built up in the first half of the book because he was everything Cadence was not – contemplation and enthusiasm; ambition and strong coffee. Kidding, he was emphatic and learned. She was spoilt milk. He stood for something. He wasn’t the stereotypical blond haired, blue eyed heartthrob whose sole raison d’être is to get with the “quirky loser girl”.

Even though the plot wasn’t a 100 or something I’d recommend, I quite enjoyed the process of reading the book. Even if it doesn’t make sense that the arson, and the corollary death of the Liars, somehow brought the aunts slightly closer to each other. Even if it doesn’t make sense that everyone so readily forgives Cadence for her role in the arson. Even if it doesn’t make sense that Cadence would even set the house on fire before giving the rest some time to scoot (they were fifteen ffs).

I think the book has its merits.

Metaphors 

That June, summer fifteen, Dad announced he was leaving and departed two days later. He told my mother he wasn’t a Sinclair, and couldn’t try to be one, any longer. He couldn’t smile, couldn’t lie, couldn’t be part of that beautiful family in those beautiful houses.
Couldn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
He had hired moving vans already. He’d rented a house, too. My father put a last suitcase into the backseat of the Mercedes (he was leaving Mummy with only the Saab), and started the engine.
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.
Mummy snapped. She said to get hold of myself.
Be normal, now, she said. Right now, she said.
Because you are. Because you can be.
Don’t cause a scene, she told me. Breathe and sit up.
I did what she asked.
She was all I had left.

Every time Gat said these things, so casual and truthful, so oblivious—my veins opened. My wrists split. I bled down my palms. I went light-headed. I’d stagger from the table or collapse in quiet shameful agony, hoping no one in the family would notice. Especially not Mummy.
Gat almost always saw, though. When blood dripped on my bare feet or poured over the book I was reading, he was kind. He wrapped my wrists in soft white gauze and asked me questions about what had happened. He asked about Dad and about Gran—as if talking about something could make it better. As if wounds needed attention.
He was a stranger in our family, even after all those years.

Welcome to my skull.
A truck is rolling over the bones of my neck and head. The vertebrae break, the brains pop and ooze. A thousand flashlights shine in my eyes. The world tilts.

I lay prone on the bathroom floors of several museums, feeling the cold tile underneath my cheek as my brain liquefied and seeped out my ear, bubbling. Migraines left my blood spreading across unfamiliar hotel sheets, dripping on the floors, oozing into carpets, soaking through leftover croissants and Italian lace cookies.

A witch has been standing there behind me for some time, waiting for a moment of weakness. She holds an ivory statue of a goose. It is intricately carved. I turn and admire it only for a moment before she swings it with shocking force. It connects, crushing a hole in my forehead. I can feel my bone come loose. The witch swings the statue again and hits above my right ear, smashing my skull. Blow after blow she lands, until tiny flakes of bone litter the bed and mingle with chipped bits of her once-beautiful goose.

Description

I am the eldest Sinclair grandchild. Heiress to the island, the fortune, and the expectations.

Johnny, he is bounce, effort, and snark. Back then he would hang our Barbies by the necks or shoot us with guns made of Lego. Mirren, she is sugar, curiosity, and rain.

His nose was dramatic, his mouth sweet. Skin deep brown, hair black and waving. Body wired with energy. Gat seemed spring-loaded. Like he was searching for something. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.

Childish, innocent writing

Johnny leapt off the boat and threw his own vest on the dock. First thing, he ran up to Mirren and kicked her. Then he kicked me. Kicked the twins. Walked over to our grandparents and stood up straight. “Good to see you, Granny and Granddad. I look forward to a happy summer.” Tipper hugged him. “Your mother told you to say that, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “And I’m to say, nice to see you again.”

I turned and ran away.
Gat followed. I could hear his feet behind me on the wooden walkways that cross the island.
I kept running. He kept following.
Johnny chased Gat. And Mirren chased Johnny.
The adults remained talking on the dock, circling politely around Ed, cooing over baby Will. The littles did whatever littles do. We four stopped running at the tiny beach down by Cuddledown House. It’s a small stretch of sand with high rocks on either side. No one used it much, back then. The big beach had softer sand and less seaweed.
Mirren took off her shoes and the rest of us followed. We tossed stones into the water. We just existed.
I wrote our names in the sand.
Cadence, Mirren, Johnny, and Gat.
Gat, Johnny, Mirren, and Cadence.
That was the beginning of us.

I left the Red Gate door before he saw me and ran down to the perimeter. I watched the darkening sky, alone.
I tore all the roses off a single sad bush and threw them, one after the other, into the angry sea.
That first night, I cried and bit my fingers and drank wine I snuck from the Clairmont pantry. I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting.

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you. Also, here is a green toothbrush tied in a ribbon.
It expresses my feelings inadequately.
Better than chocolate, being with you last night.
Silly me, I thought that nothing was better than chocolate.
In a profound, symbolic gesture, I am giving you this bar of Vosges I got when we all went to Edgartown. You can eat it, or just sit next to it and feel superior.

Look, a Fire!

Fairy tale portending the first twist

ONCE UPON A time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. He gave them whatever their hearts desired, and when they grew of age their marriages were celebrated with grand festivities. When the youngest daughter gave birth to a baby girl, the king and queen were overjoyed. Soon afterward, the middle daughter gave birth to a girl of her own, and the celebrations were repeated.
Last, the eldest daughter gave birth to twin boys—but alas, all was not as one might hope. One of the twins was human, a bouncing baby boy; the other was no more than a mouseling.
There was no celebration. No announcements were made.
The eldest daughter was consumed with shame. One of her children was nothing but an animal. He would never sparkle, sunburnt and blessed, the way members of the royal family were expected to do.
The children grew, and the mouseling as well. He was clever and always kept his whiskers clean. He was smarter and more curious than his brother or his cousins.
Still, he disgusted the king and he disgusted the queen. As soon as she was able, his mother set the mouseling on his feet, gave him a small satchel in which she had placed a blueberry and some nuts, and sent him off to see the world.
Set out he did, for the mouseling had seen enough of courtly life to know that should he stay home he would always be a dirty secret, a source of humiliation to his mother and anyone who knew of him.
He did not even look back at the castle that had been his home.
There, he would never even have a name.
Now, he was free to go forth and make a name for himself in the wide, wide world.
And maybe,
just maybe,
he’d come back one day,
and burn that
fucking
palace
to the ground.

Immediately after, Cadence remembered her arson

LOOK.
A fire.
There on the northern tip of Beechwood Island. Where the maple tree stands over the wide lawn.
The house is alight. The flames shoot high, brightening the sky. There is no one here to help.
Far in the distance, I can see the Vineyard firefighters, making their way across the bay in a lighted boat.
Even farther away, the Woods Hole fire boat chugs toward the fire that we set.
Gat, Johnny, Mirren, and me.
We set this fire and it is burning down Clairmont.
Burning down the palace, the palace of the king who had three beautiful daughters.
We set it.
Me, Johnny, Gat, and Mirren.
I remember this now,
in a rush that hits me so hard I fall,
and I plunge down,
down to rocky rocky bottom, and
I can see the base of Beechwood Island and my arms and legs feel numb but my fingers are cold. Slices of seaweed go past as I fall. And then I am up again, and breathing,
And Clairmont is burning.

The arson

There is New Clairmont. All hard modernity and Japanese garden.
I see it for what it is, now. It is a house built on ashes. Ashes of the life Granddad shared with Gran, ashes of the maple from which the tire swing flew, ashes of the old Victorian house with the porch and the hammock. The new house is built on the grave of all the trophies and symbols of the family: the New Yorker cartoons, the taxidermy, the embroidered pillows, the family portraits.
We burned them all.
On a night when Granddad and the rest had taken boats across the bay,
when the staff was off duty
and we Liars were alone on the island,
the four of us did what we were afraid to do.
We burned not a home, but a symbol.
We burned a symbol to the ground.
I looked at her. My lovely, tall mother with her pretty coil of hair and her hard, bitter mouth. Her veins were never open. Her heart never leapt out to flop helplessly on the lawn. She never melted into puddles. She was normal. Always. At any cost.
“For the health of our family,” she said eventually, “you are to break it off.”
“I won’t.”
“You must. And when you’re done, make sure Granddad knows. Tell him it’s nothing and tell him it never was anything. Tell him he shouldn’t worry about that boy again and then talk to him about Harvard and tennis team and the future you have in front of you. Do you understand me?” I did not and I would not.
I ran out of the house and into Gat’s arms.
I bled on him and he didn’t mind.

Others

It is true I suffer migraines since my accident.
It is true I do not suffer fools.
I like a twist of meaning. You see? Suffer migraines. Do not suffer fools. The word means almost the same as it did in the previous sentence, but not quite. Suffer.
You could say it means endure, but that’s not exactly right.

For the old people in my family—Mummy, the aunties, Granddad—the accumulation of beautiful objects is a life goal.
Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.
Wins what? is what I’d like to know.
I used to be a person who liked pretty things. Like Mummy does, like all the Sinclairs do. But that’s not me anymore.
Mummy has our Burlington house filled with silver and crystal, coffee-table books and cashmere blankets. Thick rugs cover every floor, and paintings from several local artists she patronizes line our walls. She likes antique china and displays it in the dining room. She’s replaced the perfectly drivable Saab with a BMW.
Not one of these symbols of prosperity and taste has any use at all.
“Beauty is a valid use,” Mummy argues. “It creates a sense of place, a sense of personal history. Pleasure, even, Cadence. Have you ever heard of pleasure?”
But I think she’s lying, to me and to herself, about why she owns these objects. The jolt of a new purchase makes Mummy feel powerful, if only for a moment. I think there is status to having a house full of pretty things, to buying expensive paintings of seashells from her arty friends and spoons from Tiffany’s. Antiques and Oriental rugs tell people that my mother may be a dog breeder who dropped out of Bryn Mawr, but she’s got power—because she’s got money.

“Heathcliff is a gypsy boy taken in and raised by this pristine family, the Earnshaws. Heathcliff falls in love with the girl, Catherine. She loves him, too—but she also thinks he’s dirt, because of his background. And the rest of the family agrees. There’s nothing Heathcliff can ever do to make these Earnshaws think he’s good enough. And he tries. He goes away, educates himself, becomes a gentleman. Still, they think he’s an animal. Then, because the book is a tragedy, Heathcliff becomes what they think of him, you know? He becomes a brute. The evil in him comes out.”
“I heard it was a romance.”
Gat shakes his head. “Those people are awful to each other.”
“You’re saying Granddad thinks you’re Heathcliff?”
“I promise you, he does,” says Gat. “A brute beneath a pleasant surface, betraying his kindness in letting me come to his sheltered island every year—I’ve betrayed him by seducing his Catherine, his Cadence. And my penance is to become the monster he always saw in me.”

They know that tragedy is not glamorous.
They know it doesn’t play out in life as it does on a stage or between the pages of a book. It is neither a punishment meted out nor a lesson conferred. Its horrors are not attributable to one single person.
Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.
That is what the children know.

I just really need to rant about the voice/ writing of this novel: IT IS SO BLAND! It really does feel like a teenage author-wannabe wrote this book, and not in a good way. I don’t need beautiful or sophisticated Khaled Hosseini writing all the time, but something less reminiscent of a Wattpad fan fiction would be greatly appreciated ya?

Perhaps it’s because I stopped reading YA quite a while now (or in fact reading at all) that I just could not get into the story due to the overly simplistic and ‘giddy teenager’ writing style that Epstein adopts. For a psychological thriller, this shut sure dragged on and ON. I only felt that the book really got into thriller territory two-thirds into the book. Waiting for something to actually happen was excruciating, and the payoff isn’t even that remarkable to speak of.

The story starts off with Tash Carmody, who witnessed her imaginary friend Sparrow lure Mallory Fisher away from a carnival. Now fifteen and mute, Mallory’s never spoken about the week she went missing. All the adults in the room decided that Tash is a lying attention-seeker who conjured Sparrow in a bid to bring herself to relevance after the birth of her brother… but is she?

What kind of fucked up psychologist tries to persuade a child that everything they’ve seen are just a part of their imagination and that they’re only conjuring these hallucinatory creatures for attention? Is this how psychologists work? Regardless of whether their conjecture (ahem diagnosis) is true, are psychologists allowed to invalidate the fears of their patients and basically gaslight them into believing an ‘alternate reality’?

I’m glad that Tash never actually was this sick mofo with identity dissociative disorder who started kidnapping kids and killing dogs because it all started when she was 8 and in no hell am I going to believe that a child can abduct another without leaving a trace of evidence that conveniently eludes the fictional trope of the useless police. However, the revelation was kinda anticlimactic too, considering how fucked up her psyche must have been when she considers all those years of psychotherapy and disdain she has had to endure due to the lying bitch of a junkie she calls aunt. Yet, apart from that two pages of wtf you screwed up my life monologue, it didn’t seem as though she was particularly affected by this traumatic revelation. I would have liked her to go full-on nihilistic and snap the aunt’s neck… until I remember that the book is probably aimed for kids / teens, judging by the writing style – so a Hannah Montana ending is what we got.

I’m totally fine with Sparrow being a human, but the fact that he did not have sadistic or some version of a dark ulterior motives is quite anti-climatic to me. I sat through over 300 pages for him to manifest as some loser junkie who got done in first by the aunt with her planted ice, then by a teenage girl in a physical fight LOL. Ridiculous.

It is also my obligation to point out that Tash and Morgan’s relationship is so NOT cute. Apart from the fact that they used to be friends and the author’s cursory mention about how they went about having a great conversation about movies and shut, I see absolutely no chemistry between the two protagonists. How any ‘cute guy in skinny jeans’ can like this weird, hallucinating liar at first sight discombobulates me. Not to mention that he is as one dimensional a cute guy can get with his unmerited love for Tash despite cool girl Rachael desperately looking to get into his pants and those subsequent awkward kisses. I also don’t understand how Tash and Rachael made up with Rachael harbouring zero romantic affection/jealousy towards Morgan towards the end. There is zero character progression in this entire book; all such slivers are but conveniently narratives to drive the story towards a happy ending. Even the mum is all like ‘yea I trust you’ after the revelation with no further explanation. Puke. 

“That said… I’m going to need a referral for a new psychiatrist.” Major cringe. The all adults are unreliable and wrong trope makes me want to gouge my eyes out.

Gave it a 2/5 on Goodreads because I never had any expectations for the book in the first place, yet it managed to disappoint me. Also, notwithstanding the fact that I’m an old piece of shit, but a thriller that did not spark even a sliver of chill deserves nothing more than a 2.