Morgan Darling > Recent Status Updates

Dreading the inevitable conflict we’re approaching

I’m so pissed that I’m falling for the “don’t let your fiance stop you from finding your husband” agenda but the writing is just so yummy I can’t help it!

This feels so meta

This book feels impossibly long AND I have a character map to keep track of all the different people … pick a struggle omg

Giving Indiana Jones had a baby with a 2000s rom-com

Also like imagine going to literal hell to save the soul of a dude and letting his soul inhabit your body and having weird sexual tension and yearning for each other across planes of existence and y’all still don’t kiss … bruh

Omfg the dissatisfaction of this grand reveal … and we don’t even know what she is/what wheelwalker means yet … and the cat is a guardian angel now ?? And the white man is evil (shocking)

I feel like the revisiting of Turner, Tripp, and Mercy as characters is fun but so far deeply underutilized compared to their presence in the first book. At first they feel like cheap narrative propellants and now they’re given greater depth and expanse seemingly with purpose to give Alex a wider emotional bandwidth. Boring use of characterization when they’re so interesting. Also random vampire lore drop???

“There were always excuses for why girls died.” Oh yeah baby now we’re in it!!!!

It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who wrote YA fantasy series Shadow and Bone …

Hey so what I just read was actually profoundly devastating and sad for a fantasy world

Actually quite excited to reread this one!

Girl do not trust your ambiguous situationship who tells you he will wait for you 😭

Cocaine Bear exists in the Emily Henry multiverse confirmed

I’ve read 30 pages and I think I am a Logan Lerman as Miles Nowak truther?

“There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate…that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation - a necessary endeavor, however futile, to move between them.”

“The barricades had the peculiar effect of building community. They were all comrades in arms behind those walls, no matter their origins, and the regular deliveries…came with handwritten messages of encouragement. Robin had expected only violence, not solidarity, and he wasn’t sure what to do with this show of support. It defied what he had come to expect of the world. He was scared to let it make him hope.”

“This was what it took: a show of force. If the people could not be won over by words, they would be persuaded by destruction.”

I am loving this world & Kuang’s fundamental understanding of humanity; its deference to convenience over sound ethics/morals, and ultimately, the necessity of violence to instill change. Words cannot move mountains, only explosives.

“Robin wondered then how much of [name]’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people…and…if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at [them] and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered [and] when they wouldn’t have to go through endless distortions just to be understood.”

“‘The college took me in and hid me until I was legally declared a free man - not because they care much about abolition either, but because [they] knew my worth. And they knew if I were sent back to America, they would lose me …There are no kind masters…it doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’”

“Letty could not cry on command; …So it did feel cathartic, seeing her break down like this, knowing that at last she understood how they all felt. It was a relief to see that in her they still had an ally. Still, something did not seem right, …it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.”

“Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China…and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract - just categories of use, exchange, and value - until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw it looming above all the spectre of colonial labor and colonial pain.”