Sofie’s Reviews > Hazelthorn > Status Update

yknow it’s pretty fucking hard to read when tears are blocking the way cg drews did you ever think about THAT
the garden is not EVIL it was twisted into a thing of rage bc of the abuse it suffered, but it could HEAL. it could hunger for warmth instead of blood, for love instead of vengeance

HE JUST WANTED A FUCKING FRIEND HE JUST WANTED TO PLAY
CG DREWS WHEN I CATCH YOU

“did it ever try to hurt him or did he just hurt himself refusing his roots?” yeah. that part.

the metaphor for neurodivergence is so fantastic WOW the overgrown garden that byron tried so desperately to prune and control is representative of all the “abnormal” behaviors that neurotypical people are so afraid of or weirded out by. and the rage from all of that abuse has now consumed it and evander. i really do think this’ll end with him embracing the garden and returning to it, maybe alongside laurie

this reveal also adds to the reasons why laurie didn’t tell evander the truth until he absolutely had to!!! it’s not just for plot convenience, he has DEEP trauma from his past attempts to tell the truth of the garden

my heart is breaking for laurie holy shit????? he and evander are both victims of the same abuse and i know this is a horror novel above all but i REALLY hope they get a semi-happy ending where they can finally be free together

oh god the rubies are growing inside of evander aren’t they. that’s why byron kept him around and kept him starved and pliable and drugged. the garden still lives inside of him

“a little starvation to motivate it to behave” this sums up the entire fucked up dynamic between byron and evander and the garden so perfectly. byron thought that by starving both the garden and evander, they’d be easier to control, but the opposite turned out to be true in the end. he unknowingly fostered starved lions and then trapped himself in a coliseum with them

okay so a lot of things are clearer now but the biggest question to me is still why did they not just kill evander that day in the garden? why didn't they finish the job in any of the years that followed? why keep him alive at all? was byron really that sadistic and obsessed with trying to understand and CONTROL the garden that he couldn't let go of the one living link he had to it? actually yeah that tracks

but also going back to the whole feeding people to the garden thing: to what fucking END though?? why do the lennox-halls do this?? how LONG have they been doing it?? it can't be just for experimentation's sake if bane is still keeping it up. maybe the garden's rage will come for them all if they don't keep it quiet and fed? like some kind of generational curse built from all the collected pain of the victims?