Graceish ✨ > Recent Status Updates

REALLY?! Again?! Darrow is an idiot, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

The use of both metric and imperial measurements are throwing me off. Character 2 is “over seven feet tall” and character 2 can jump “three meters”, so can easily clear him.

I understand 7’ and I understand 3m. But it’s jarring for me to go between them Willy-nilly. Is this common?! Have I just never noticed before?!

[Mud on my face. My golden hair wild. I look a terror.
"Are you June?" I growl.
"N-no... why?"
"Can you cook?"]

I laughed out loud. This was a great scene, tbf.

The proctors allowing sexual violence is something else.

How are they using a compass on Mars?! Did they create a more stable magnetosphere?

[I missed one question. Just one. Out of hundreds.]

This is so absurd as to be stupid. So they have managed to find the one genius to turn into an absolutely absurd “Gold”?! None of this is believable to me. This reads more and more like YA, where everything just falls into place without demonstrable, reasonable actions. This is why I can’t with SciFi. At least fantasy admits it’s all nonsense at the get go.

[Before I sleep, I drink a tonic laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anahasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing three thousand years of literature and legal code and history.]

Oh, please. 🙄

I’m struggling to accept all of this science. It just feels… unconvincing.

Curious that Darrow knows that automobile exhaust smells like.

[The men are freakishly muscular and tall. Their arms and chests bulge with artificial strength, and they flaunt their muscle like girls showing off new toys.]

Like girls showing off new toys? Why girls specifically? I genuinely don’t understand this simile.

And another mention of the inhabitability, and danger of eating anything that did grow on earth. I totally get that the Reds aren’t educated, but simple logic would have them guessing all of what they’d been told about earth and mars.

[All I possess is my family and myself. ... We didn't spend the money to send the pioneers here. Without them, we'd be on the dying Earth like the rest of humanity.]

If I were him, I would question how it is that Earth humans are able to produce and deliver the food for the terraformers of Mars, but are in constant war and dying “like the rest of” Earth humans. So who is growing the food on earth?

I *literally* exclaimed and threw my book on the counter. HOLY. SHIT.

How did she start the fire?

I am *sick* and tired of fantasy books having something terrible happen to a cat, domestic, wild, or otherwise. What is this trend?!

I am SUPER confused by the time of this book. So many indicators put Alice in postgraduate work in the mid 80s, but here it’s saying Alice read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style in grade school. That book was published in 1999.

[“…They say to write until you've done your best work, and when you've done your best work, the ships will come to bring you across the Lethe."
"What's the point of them?"
"Entertainment, I'm sure. I certainly enjoy reading others' drafts. I came upon a whole stack subtitled My Lolita the other day. Now, that one was really fun!"]

The way this made me grimace.

[She tried to place him at least geographically or temporally, because then she could at least rack her memory for mention of any horrendous crimes, say, at Yale in the sixties, but Gradus had been so long in the underworld that he made no references to place himself.]

Not so! She said she likes the Beatles and Bach, and he called her pretentious, which indicated he must know of both. So latest death could be 1964?

While I am adoring this book, I wish we got just a bit more about the courts. For example, I’m unsure what the punishment/test is in Violence. We didn’t even see a Shade. I want a bit more of the Underworld filled out, in the same way that the magic systems in this book are SO thorough.

Well, Babel made me cry, who why shouldn’t Katabasis, too? 😭

Not to be pedantic or anything, but is he using a pen or a pencil? Are they interchangeable in England?

[Even the plant turned its face toward the sun. Even the tiniest ant sought food; the brainless worm sought soil. It was all so easy for living creatures—all except people, except people like her, who had a knack for seeking only that which made them miserable.]

Everyone should read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.

Alice really is the worst. Good on Helen for laying it straight.

I knew Escher had to play some part in this story! With that cover?!

This book is 🤌

[… beyond which all she could see was thunder.]

Thunder?! Surely this is meant to say lightning…

So, the question now is: do actions in Hell affect your son count?! Because this is about to be bad.

["Eternal recurrence," Peter murmured. "Everything that has happened will happen again."
“Don't quote Nietzsche on my boat," said Elspeth.
"Mea culpa."]

I love this book so much. Kuang is a genius.

Is Alice Chinese? Did I miss that detail before? Or is she a white American who speaks Chinese?! Did I project whiteness onto her this entire time?! 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

[My name is Alice Law—
IF ALICE-?
I am a postgraduate at Cambridge—
IF ALICE-?
I study analytic magick—
If ALICE?]

Why is the last one not IF like the prior two?

I just wrote out the logic to the past two pages of this puzzle, and I am CONVINCED that Alice either purposefully or accidentally got the Weaver Girl to tell her what Peter would choose.