Sati Marie Frost > Recent Status Updates

I’m on page 76 and I can’t get into this at all. It got great reviews (and I need something written during NaNoWriMo for a challenge) so I persist, but for whatever reason I’m not feeling it.

The clothing in this book is just 💋

I probably would have really liked this one if I’d read it when I was younger.

I kind of have a love-hate thing going with D.E. Athkins. Her characters make SUCH bad choices. It’s like every choice there is to make, they choose the worst possible option.

Egads. That end…uh. I’m not going to say it ruined the book totally, but I don’t like it.

I like that Jared is bitching about using public transport. Very realistic, for an American teenager. 😄

Oh, I stand corrected on the names, Dad’s just being silly and calling them by names that aren’t their own. Still, my point stands (though slightly less of it).

This is a really good book in a lot of ways, but one of the things I really appreciate is how Rees Brennan portrays a racially blended family. They’re so totally normal, and much like many multiracial families that I’ve met. The kids have English names and Japanese names and use both. They all have different physical characteristics. Not all authors manage to do that without othering them.

So, she has what she THINKS is an imaginary friend, and hasn’t bothered to confirm whether he’s real or not? That’s odd, in this day and age. It’s easy enough to figure that out, unless something is blocking you from exchanging contact info. Even back in the early 00s when this was written, they could have exchanged email - or asked to, and got “what’s email?” in response, which would also help.

Starting off with a Christina Rossetti quote, and not a particularly well-known one. That’s a very good sign.

I love Pierce, and this is not intended as a criticism, but I always smile when Alanna and Myles go to the ruins of the Old Ones that are supposed to be so ancient as to be a totally different culture, practically a different race, that very little is known about them, and then Myles says, “it’s six centuries old, at least”. It’s such an American perspective.

Piranesi was excellent and The Stranger was very good, but man, I need to stop reading books that spook me for a while.

He knows about crisps and fish fingers and sausage rolls. Why does he not question why he knows these things, or what they are, or where they come from? He seems utterly complacent and uninterested in the weirdnesses that occur.

He remembers what petrol smells like (and presumably what petrol is).

My theory, for now, is that this is sort of a mind-palace that P is trapped in - maybe by someone else, maybe of his own accord - and some force is forcing him to forget, and another is trying to force him to remember.

He’s finally wondering something!

He knows how to read. He knows what canvas and rubber are. He knows what shoes are! Where did he learn these things?

P does not seem to be questioning where his clothes or journals or the statues came from at all, which I find incredibly odd. The House is all there is, and there have been fifteen people in the world. How does he think the statues were made? He is the most uncurious narrator I have ever encountered - and claims to be a scientist! It’s quite creepy.

Ah, seaweed can be used as fuel. Fair enough.

“I fetched him a blanket and hot soup made of seaweed and mussels.” How are you making hot soup, Piranesi? This is the strangest amnesia I’ve ever heard of, and I say this as someone who’s suffered amnesia at least twice. The Other’s machines (?) are “shining device[s]” but P clearly has some way of cooking, and probably not a wood fire given that there are no plants. Gas?

I finished the POPSUGAR 2020 reading challenge! Not having much else to do this year, I took on six years of POPSUGAR reading challenges (2020-2025) in addition to the Goodreads and Kindle challenges, and I finally finished one of them.

https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainm...

I am already just about ready to rate this five stars. It’s just so WEIRD. But sometimes weird books become mundane halfway through, or more commonly are let down by bad endings, so I shall restrain myself until I’m done. But I wish I had this much imagination.

I do like an unreliable narrator, and Piranesi is an interesting one. He (?) remembers some things but not others - and his memories contradict. One moment he dreamed of a faun in a snowy forest, the next he wonders if trees exist. What sort of amnesia is this?

This is fascinating already, but may be too stylised for me. The capitalisation irritates me.

Oh, he’s turned Hantengu. How unjust! How unfair that I should be in this position! He’s convincing enough that I’m howling along with him, even though he deserves it. Uncanny.

Not once has he said, or been asked, why he killed the guy. And I have no idea. He seemed to have a pretty decent life, and I have no idea why he did it.

This is such a curious book. I feel outrage at the behaviour of this kangaroo court, trying to make him out to be a killer with no morals - and then I remember that he did, in fact, kill a man in cold blood for no real reason.

Ah, so that’s why I find our protagonist slightly scummy but charming. He reminds me a bit of my mother.

This is a hard one for me, because it’s incredibly engaging, but I can’t help but feel our protagonist is kind of scummy. The whole friends-with-Raymond thing icks me out. And yet his voice is not off-putting the way a lot of protagonists from these sorts of stories are. He’s quite charming, for all that he’s a void.

…oh. No joy, only void. Just like me.