mairiachi > Recent Status Updates

when Death and Fortune tell the woman to choose who gets to go home, it says she "let go" of her kid. Earlier they were holding hands - even if she isnt emotionally attached to her mother, you still hold on to what you know in the face of the unknown, and Death & Fortune are definitely unknown. I think it's odd that she could just let go of the girl's hand bc that indicates that the girl isn't holding on back.

"And I would loathe for either of those opportunities to go to waste."
I think the author might mean "and I would be loath to let either of those", bc loathe doesn't make sense (you're disgusted for either of those to go to waste? Huh?) unless you read it with the meaning of loath in mind.

The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, and then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction.
this sentence made me go "huh?" and then laugh. Honestly I could see why the women look that way, but he has such odd takes/descriptions and fails to clarify.

It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century
(lol)

"She was seventeen, Crippen thirty and already a widower, but the distance between them was not as great as chronology alone suggested, for Miss Turner had the demeanor and physical presence of a woman much older." (!???) "Her figure was full and inevitably drew forth the adjective voluptuous."
HUH? Call me modern and uptight but I got a lotttt of issues with the way he's portraying this situation.

When men first encountered sparks, as when a lightning bolt incinerated their neighbors, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrive with a violence unlike anything else in the world.

In the beginning, in the invisible realm where electromagnetic energy traveled, there was emptiness. Such energy did exist, of course, and traveled in the form of waves launched from the sun or by lightning or any random spark, but these emanations rocketed past without meaning or purpose, at the speed of light.

"My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice." —Marconi

Also after Wolf tells her not to light the lamp, she's instantly tempted as soon as she hears a noise outside even though she knows not to, and keeps reminding herself it's dangerous. But she has zero spine and is so tempted, which is dumb, bc you're not gonna see anything so what's the point?? They're on the other side of the door, light wouldn't reveal anything. She's such a stupid, boring MC.

Another example of bad writing: it doesn't show or tell the stepmom being the stereotypical evil stepmom, unless you count being fake and petty which isn't evil. Just immature. It's hard to believe she hates her life sm, or is so willing to run away, bc of Donia.

the writing itself is just so mid.
p76:
"'Echo?' His voice was strange and slurred with sleep."
p77:
"What I'd thought was sleep I realized was an accent, a weird emphasis on his i's and a's."
..."echo" has neither I nor A in it, so how would she initially think it was sleep slurring his voice 😑 I hate small stupid mistakes like this, totally ruins the reading experience for me.

The prose in this book is so stuuuupidddd

he wasn't going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he'd drunk Spindle-water, and he'd held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He'd keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn't feel the lack of them anymore.

I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me. I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a dis-tant shadow but happy anyway.

They were all quarreling, it seemed to me, about whether to build a house on this side or that of a river, and ignoring the spring-flood mark on a tree nearby, higher than either door would be.

Natalya put me to sleep in Marta's old room, a little bedroom full of sun, with a worn rag doll sitting on the shelf and a small outgrown quilt. She'd gone to her own home now, but the room was still shaped around her.

The creaking was every song I'd ever heard about war and bat-tle; the horses clopping along, the drum-beat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

yesterday six thousand men had marched over this road; today they were all gone. They lay dead in the trenches, they lay dead in the hall, in the cellars, on the long winding stairs going down.

like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn't stand to lose what he'd already spent.

I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them—this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man.

They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings.

He wasn't saying anything I didn't know, hadn't known even when I'd come flying home like a bird to its burning nest.

his shoulders were relaxing as he listened to Solya, swallow-ing down that poisonously convenient explanation.

as if truth didn't mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn't come and listen.

It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can't change what's wrong.

If Ballo couldn't find it in a book, that meant it couldn't be so, and if he found it in three books, that meant it was the unvarnished truth.