Sarah Mac’s Reviews > The Web of Days > Status Update

'Standing at a distance I watched the flames leap high to change the mist that hung above into swirls of crimson bloom & I pressed my sleeve against my face to hold out the sweetish sickening odor of burning flesh. I told myself it would be quickly over--that the old wood of the outhouse burned like paper--in but a little time only a pile of gray ashes would remain.'

'There were times when my resolution to resist him wavered, when I found worthless all my effort & my struggle. It was on those nights when I lay dreading the opening of my bedroom door & in those dawns when I left that bedroom feeling bruised & shaken, knowing a shame that negated all accomplishment.' ....Poor Hester, unwillingly burdened with hormonal response. :D

St Clair is utterly repulsive in his lazy, yawning, uninvolved indolence...& that's not touching his creepy 'bodies buried in the backyard' aura & constant innuendoes. How this woman convinces herself to marry him -- even for material security -- is beyond me. HELL NO.

Heheh. Yankee governess heroine attends a Reconstruction carnival: 'Between shows we drank pink lemonade & ate gingersnaps. At the shooting gallery where for 10 cents you had three chances to shoot at a villainously painted picture of General Sherman, I felt a tug of shame when Roi's bullet pierced that brave soldier squarely in the wild blue eye the artist had given him.' ....#awkward.

'So few graves, I thought, to account for the passage of almost a hundred years. Indeed, except for a few pitiful graves of children, these were all. The LeGrands had been no great burgeoning family, I saw, but had produced charily--as if they had held themselves aloof even from life itself.'

'I did not know then that their conversation had to do w/ me; that I know it now is part of that dark knowledge the possession of which was to change the whole aspect of my life. Even when the young man turned & looked at me, I realized only that he had caught me staring at him. Embarrassed, I turned my head & gazed out of the window beside me, though all I could see was my own pale reflection in the pane.'

'It is not a comfortable sensation for a young woman to feel alone in the world, & bound for a destination of which she has no knowledge, yet lacking a place to which she may return if that destination fails to please. And already I knew that this green land of muddy rivers weaving thru wide sea marshes, cut by salt creeks, broken by islands w/ mysterious names, was as foreign to me as tho it lay across the sea.'