Stitch > Recent Status Updates

They really need to hurry up and eat that man.

I can't believe I have half of this book to go.

This is so much.

"I may be young and a bit naive, but I'm not stupid." is such a line to come from a lady who willingly slept with a demon while lying to herself that it was an angel.

It's not that the protagonist is unlikeable, but that being in the head of a wannabe trad wife about to make very bad decisions (somehow worse than her previous ones) is absolutely painful and frustrating. But I'm still listening!

I can't believe i'm only on the first chapter. Wow.

There are some exhilarating thrills and twists in the latter quarter of the flashback that never ends. However, they're overshadowed, for me, by the way Helena (and Kaine, but we're not in HIS head are we) makes so many incomprehensible decisions. At one point, I was like "do you know you have thirty minutes" at my copy of the book.

For me, I think the consensual (ish) encounters that Kaine and Helena have in the flashback that never ends make the horror and cruelty of the first part really hard to stand and reckon with. I dislike Kaine more than I did when he slaughtered a family for an audience of the Undying and their family members. Which is a wild thing to say.

Almost halfway there. Some things I find fascinating about the flashback chapters:
- they make the "present" chapters in pt 1 even worse as you realize who/what everyone is and doing
- absolutely hamfisted/heavy handed attempts at making the Order "as bad as" the Undying
- the serial numbers are SHINING if you know the source media and the source ship fandom's propensity for writing the OG!MC

This book is so... I'm partway through what appears to be a 600+ page flashback and it's interesting (and I know it was in the original fic in some capacity??) but it's also such a slog. Also, if you know of the source material, it's super transparent about how it's attempting to re/frame the good/bad guys as "just as bad" as each other. I am... frowning.

How is this book so good??? I already crave a sequel, what nonsense is this?

I don't think I'll ever be used to how Rice handles kid vampires. Mostly because there's a *lot* that she isn't handling about them. Benji is adorable, but there are logistics to being a child vamp that aren't addressed here and don't seem to be addressed in any of her books actually. (I always gravitate towards things to do with child development in supernatural books...whoops?)