Kelsy > Recent Status Updates

I’m vacillating between liking and hating this book. I’m perpetually waiting for a payoff, and at almost halfway through I’m becoming increasingly concerned it won’t arrive.

Also, as a museum person, I’m constantly wanting to throttle the protagonist for the obnoxious things she says/does. Not sure if that’s intentional or not…It’s making it very difficult for me to root for her.

“Theirs, he insisted, was a righteous victimization…Yet he promised his followers that they would one day rule the world.”

“In the midst of this concussive period of change, Strang offered his followers—many of whom were losers in mid-nineteenth-century America’s economic, demographic, and social convulsions—a sense of belonging and purpose, a belief that they alone could purify an unclean world and that he alone could show them how. He furnished them with simple solutions to their problems, scapegoats for their miseries…”

“There must be terrible purpose in it . . . the pain and fear had been terrible. He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.”

“‘There have been such strange unexpected changes in my life during these last two years, that I feel more than ever that it is not worth while to calculate too closely what I should do if any future event took place. I try to think only on the present.’” - Margaret Hale in North & South, by Elizabeth Gaskell