Eekind > Recent Status Updates

Lady Betram being zooted through several sections of this book is wild. First it’s just like she’s putting on airs and now that Fannie is 15 it’s like “Lady Betram has chronic pain/extended illness/ seasonal depression, so for this section she’s going to be starting shit with her sister and then be completely unbothered about the drama she is initiating because she’s so absent”.

For a physician that insists we need a radical change in our political system that centers BIPOC people as being deserving of equity in healthcare & education, We sure ran back to the “Democrats did racism to” and “I’m not saying everyone needs to be a democrat”…truly keep this fence sitting shit to yourself. Conservatives will think you’re a lib for thinking marginalized ppl deserve civil rights

For my notes, three sisters. One marries a Baron, One marries a Vicar who serves under the Baron and then Fannies mother marries a lieutant something who becomes an alcoholic after a workman’s comp issue and they have 9 kids. Also the sisters got into a tiff yrs ago

Also Insane pull coming off two VC Andrews books that Sir Betram is immediately afraid Fannie is going to try to seduce one of her first cousins???

So 1964-1966 would have been a huge sea change for integrating hospitals starting with the 1964 Civil rights act, 1965 Medicade and Medicare Act and basically the forerunner to HHS (before it was created in 1979) enforcing and fining non integrated hospitals

TW: Self Harm, Suicide, Gun Violence
I do feel couching your findings about Gun Deaths as “This is how many productive hours this person could have worked between when they died and when they could have retired” and “This is how many years these people could have lived based on their age and avg lifespan for their Demographics” is like extremely inflammatory even if you want the data to be “quantitative”

Racial Resentment and Dying of Whiteness are both great terms for the general vibe of this administration which isn’t surprising given this was published immediately after the first Trump admin.

IDK if I find the most potent data to be around public school, healthcare and gun control but the author is a physician so I can understand wanting quantitative data to undergrid his overall thesis

Enjoying the thesis statement so far 🌈

Not to be a little dummy on main but apparently the Audible app has Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and almost all of Jane Austen books except Love and Friendship as audiobooks for free??? So I was able I just download them into my library. This basically means I have no excuse not to read Wuthering Heights before the movie comes out on Valentine’s Day even tho it’s 14 hour long

Not Germaine to my current % but I was obsessed with Heaven going to school in Atlanta and reading Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and a biography of the Brontë Sisters and being like “This me”…having not read either but knowing the general story arch does make me giggle about VC putting her characters in horrible conditions under the thumb of rich ppl only to be like “ don’t be pissed, this has precedent”

Well now they’re both abusing Heaven…they’re both physical forms of abuse and she needs to figure out how to get out of this situation because it’s only becoming more dangerous.

I have mixed feelings about Kitty playing into the Crazy=Dangerous trope but I also feel like it’s been well established she was physically abused as a child. Also Cal is doing sexual abuse to Heaven like Kitty did to him.

I get that Heaven is 17 but why is she having an emotional affair with her 27 year old Foster Dad. I get that VC is trying to show how Kitty is screwing herself over by allowing the two younger people she is abusing to collude behind her back even though they both want to love her…but this is in the pantheon of her most cringe tropes because why is Heaven going on movie dates with her Foster Dad without commentary

Kitty and Cal are giving babies having babies vibes even tho they’re like 37 and adopting a 15 yo.

I was pleased that when VC introduces all of the crazy clay animal pottery she immediately notes theyre Kittys designs and not just brique a brac she bought. Even tho she’s a flawed character I like that she gets to be neurotic and have hobbies and standards. It helps differentiate her from other abusive VC parents

So I am just picturing a red head Dolly Parton for Kitty. I assume Cal is like a soft spoken Montgomery Cliff or Anthony Perkins.

Also I am just assuming this is supposed to take place in the Mid 60’s. So it makes sense that in a colder Mtn climate adults are still wearing flannel and wool suits while still being a good 5 years off trend. IDK what Kitty is wearing that’s a pink suit jacket with pants in ‘65

VC Andrews the queen that you are…the second I say I am struggling to empathize with Heaven wanting her siblings to stay in poverty, she’s all alone with Luke and Toby and says “I’ve never been more alone…Tom took all the joy, laughter & light out of our home when he left…no one will ever call me Heaven Leigh again”. She has me all misty just thinking about it, VC knows exactly how to pull at ur emotion

I understand that the concept of an abusive absentee dad selling his children to rich infertile couples for $500 a piece the week after Christmas Day following his bedraggled second wife fleeing from their hovel on the side of a mountain is supposed to be abject to most readers. But it’s hard for me to side with Heaven 100% and be mad at Fannie for choosing the Wise’s over living in abject poverty on a mountain

Luke Casteel coming home on Christmas Eve only to to sell his two youngest children to a rich lawyer and his wife on Christmas Day. Heaven coming apart at the seams knowing he’ll never be able to compensate the lawyer even if she can get Our Jane and Keith back and having flashback to all of Keith and James formative moments because she felt like a second mother to them :(

As frustrated and I get with Heaven in these sections where she’s literally letting her Grandpa and younger siblings freeze and starve on the side of the mountain because she’s too proud to ask from help from Logan or Ms. Deale, I do find the writing very effective. Because as much as Heaven is self aware of her Pride, it’s still a character flaw that she can’t surmount and it’s presented in a realized way

The most annoying thing about the writing style here vs My Sweet Audrina is how unmoored from place many scenes can be. It feels like VC is in such a rush to get us to the horrible father plot that all these scenes setting up the family dynamic don’t get time to breath. We go from having conversations about Heaven and Tom’s schoolwork at school to the cabin and then on the road to school, which feels unpolished

TW: Child Death
The Baby Casteel and Granny Annie Brandywine Casteel death scenes did feel like Dickensian level mortality plays for Luke and Sara. Obviously Syphilis can do that to a baby and we’ve already established that this family barely has enough money for food much less antibiotics, birth control pills or prenatal vitamins. This book is about it how being poor compounds issues so this is the intended effect

When Heaven says she feels 1K years old and she’s only 13…this is Eldest Daughter Syndrome pumped up to a million because she has a Grandmother and Stepmother trying to hold this house together and still Heaven feels like she’s a failing single mother when it comes to setting up her three youngest siblings for success. Also a very Brother-Sister Substitute parents vibe going on with Heaven, Tom & Our Jane

I was gonna say the 1970’s was a bad decade for the name Damien between this and the Omen. And then I find out Father Damien is named after a Catholic priest that serves a leprosy colony and died in the 1880’s…which could mean nothing

Making me wait 80% of the book to get back to Merrin as a main character…

Why is he walking around the Psychiatrists office looking like that…cant he wear a nice shirt when he’s a Psychiatrist Priest pretending not to be a Priest…also he keeps getting stuck on the PK like why do you think that’s not of spiritual significance…you just made me read like four paragraphs of symptoms of demonic Possession but the TK is a bridge too far???

The section where Father Karras was trying to convince Chris that Regan just had PK was deranged. Like, we’re supposed to think an adolescent being able to throw her bedroom furniture around the room is more realistic than her being possessed by the Devil…that really felt like trying to treat the symptoms not the disease

A pretty underlying issue I have with this book is that it’s so limp on what it wants readers to learn or take away from this book. Fugelsang has all this bravado when it suits him but when he’s trying to write actionable sections every takeaway is “You can swing at windmills with bigots but at least it will help other progressive people around you feel seen”.

I am a big enough person to admit that the Cocaine Bear (2023) reference in the Elisha story was genuinely funny and his wife was shading him for making him feel stupid about whether two bears could main 42 kids. With the context of Cocaine Bear that story is genuinely hilarious. The Winters Tale by Shakespeare also has a similar joke which I find delightful

This book reads like it’s supposed to be broken up into a bunch of clips you watch on reels…like it really just isn’t using the medium of text effectively. If feels way too all over the place and even as an audiobook I have a hard time keeping track of his insights beyond his big chapter wide thesis statements

Say what you Will about this book, when it succeeds it’s spectacular. The scene with Father Karras and Chris on the bridge is stupendous and you see how well uses its existing medium while still being easily translate able for adaptation

If the movie is accurate I won’t have to sit through any more of these horrible Lt. Kinderman scenes…they so plodding and overlong and have created so much unnecessary bloat In this book because it’s not a religious crime book it’s a religious horror / thriller. Also Kinderman is written like a bad OC that’s just there to provide endless exposition that I don’t care about.

Super interesting discussion of faith. I appreciated how we are getting a window into all of these women’s complicated relationships with faith. From Chris being an atheist, Sharon being more eastern religion focused and Mrs Parent being a Catholic medium. I think it adds so much texture to the proceedings because it shows where they characters start in their view of the world and how that may be challenged