Morwen’s Reviews > Daughter of Crows > Status Update

This is giving me so much anxiety 🫣

She saw nothing save her own tight-pressed limbs, and despaired, but somehow, she wormed her way up by fractions. When her fingertips found the chimney pot’s edge she advanced a swift hand’s length before running out of room to bend her elbows. She caught the breeze in her palms now, comically and tragically trapped but close enough to freedom to touch it.

I am haunted by the ghost of myself. By the ghosts of myself. By the little girl, the young woman, the mother, wife, by the widow fresh in her grief. Even yesterday watches with a stranger’s caution as it stands at my shoulder.

‘Memory . . .’ When she hid from Night-Father she erased herself, not from her own mind but from his while she clung to the memory that she existed. The poison’s gift, if you survived it, wasn’t forgetting but remembering.

Completing her revolution, she took the direction she least wanted to go in, letting her fear guide her. If something terrible was lurking out there , better to face it head on than to let it stalk her.

To be wholly without fear was to lack imagination, and imagination – though a two-edged sword – was important for survival.

Night came, too soon as it always did, and Father became the thing that hunted them.

He forced them to dig so deep that they erased not only their presence but their present, deleting who they were so that they could be further moulded to suit his purpose.

Day-Father used words, examples, slaps, and diagrams to make his points, Night-Father simply applied pressure, forcing them to quiet their souls, erase themselves, become nothing so that they might remain unnoticed while he passed by. With his howling and his cruel nails, his sniffing in the dark, wild laughter, and whispered threats Night-Father sought to make them bury themselves in the void.

Every time I start to think I've got the hang of what's going on, a completely different storyline is introduced 😂
I have no idea where this is going but I'm intrigued!

Sometimes she thought that while Day-Father taught them many lessons, how to read, how to reason, even how to fight, that Night-Father had only one lesson to teach. He wanted Eldest to beat Tune. He wanted both of them to learn to hate.

Famine changes the way people look at the world. Things that would never have been considered foodstuffs become worth chewing on in the hope that they might be. Old leather might carry the savour of the cow. Perhaps what could be scraped from the bottom of barrels in the pantry still remembered the grain or pulses that were stored there.