Katrice’s Reviews > Swallows > Status Update

But even a dull man sometimes ended up on top, as long as he said and did the right things.

In this society, you could command respect as long as you were someone’s wife, no matter how dull your husband was. The world would always defer to a woman who was the property of a man. Though, of course, that respect was ultimately directed toward the husband more than the wife

He needed to see for himself just how talented his child would be. It wasn’t just the child’s innate talent he cared about, but how hard it would work to apply that talent, what other abilities it might have, whether it would grow into a trustworthy person. Clearly, his desire for a child was really about his own ego.

It made Riki furious that men were allowed to buy women yet ridiculed them when they chose to sell themselves.

But eventually she realized what made these jobs so intolerable to her: it was the sense that her fate was already decided, that there was nowhere else to go—while, in reality, she still had no idea who she was, or what she wanted to do with her life.