Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 15 The Tower or, “The first time the card in the chapter title was actually applicable to what happens in the plot” (Part One)

I’m cutting this chapter into installments, as the recaps will be long. Because there is…a lot.

When we last met, Lani Sarem had just clearly purchased five-star reviews on Amazon and GoodReads in some kind of weird bid to…I don’t know. I have no idea what she felt a hundred or so five-star reviews were going to do for her clumsy scam six months after the fact, but she did it.

At least one of those five-star reviews was real, though, and author Heidi Heilig (The Girl From Everywhere, The Ship Beyond Time) happened to notice something…interesting about two books that were reviewed by the same account:

Since you can’t read the entire glowing review from the screencap, this is what Hendricks has to say about Handbook For Mortals:

I loved this book! It’s such a fun read. The characters are well written and the story is unique. I don’t want to give anything away but I love how the magician is tied to story. She’s a strong female protagonist and I love that about it but it’s just a cool story. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next book and I’m also stoked for the movie. The chapters being based off of tarot cards is also fun and if you are into tarot and magick this is your kind of book. It’s cool that it’s set in modern day. I like fantasies but get overloaded with complicated lands and names and I really don’t like dystopian. I know there was also this hubub about if it is or isn’t YA…seriously? who cares…It’s clearly meant for girls who are teenagers to read and have someone to look up to and if you are older you can still relate…I think it’s weird the only ones that care about that seem to be actual adults who aren’t “YA” either if we are saying that’s 13-18 year olds…I think this is a great book and if you are into THIS kind of thing you will love it…if you aren’t then of course you might not love it but stop hating on those that do.

So what. Lisa Hendricks has bad taste, right? That’s nothing to do with Lani Sarem. After all, they are two very different books and not everyone is going to like every single thing, right?

Except, you may remember from, oh, this entire fucking time that Lani Sarem has had it out for Angie Thomas ever since Handbook For Mortals was removed from the New York Times bestseller list and The Hate U Give was returned to its rightful spot. From the legendary “It’s not my fault that Angie is black!” comment to the fact that she has continually alleged that forces behind The Hate U Give have sabotaged Handbook For Mortals out of jealousy, Lani Sarem cannot stand to see Angie Thomas authentically achieving something that Sarem feels should have been handed to her just because she wanted it.

Still, how is Lisa Hendricks connected to all this?

She’s thanked in the gargantuan and self-congratulatory acknowledgments section of Handbook For Mortals:

To Lisa Hendricks for being my second mom, and for more things than I could ever write into words. Some girls need more than one mom, and lots of guidance, and I would probably be curled up on the side of the road somewhere if it weren’t for you. Thank you for letting me make your home mine, for being the voice of reason, for just being awesome, and for showing me who I should always strive to become.

Lisa Hendricks one-starred a book about a black teenager who sees her best friend shot by the police as “depressing” and it just happens to be the book that was knocked out of and later returned to the coveted #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list during this fiasco, and she’s the person who shows Lani who she should strive to become? Checks out. Your work here is done, Lisa.

In case you remain unconvinced that this is a personal strike on Sarem’s behalf, Hendricks has only reviewed three things on Amazon: The Hate U Give and Handbook For Mortals on February 14, 2018, and then a camera tripod four years ago.

Though Sarem didn’t offer an explanation as to why these reviews suddenly started popping up (and she didn’t disavow a relationship with Hendricks, which to be perfectly honest, I thought she would do despite the overwhelming evidence that she does know her), she did make it very clear that Heidi Heilig’s grasp on reality would not be tolerated:

Making things up to get tweets is really bad. Making up sales, reviews, celebrity connections, that’s all totally okay. But taking screenshots that clearly show the truth is really bad.

Chapter fifteen surprisingly does not begin “a few weeks later.” Instead, it picks up right at the start of the show, which goes well despite Mac bailing (which Liver and Zonions isn’t aware of). Then, we arrive at the finale. The big illusion that Zuckerberg and Spopperfield have been working on in secret this whole time.

I  took a deep breath and tried to focus and clear my head. I needed to; I had to have a clear, focused mind to pull it off.

I’m putting that there because it’s important and it hardly ever gets mentioned again in this chapter.

Now, at this point, we don’t have a real sense of where Zagnut is in relation to any action happening, so when she says “Charles came on stage,” in the next paragraph, my assumption is that she is on the stage. She says he stands in the middle of “the platform,” by which I assume she means the stage. Anyway, wherever the fuck Chuck is standing, he says:

“This is perhaps the hardest illusion anyone has ever attempted to do. I ask that everyone stay completely quiet while my gifted performer makes her very first attempt at this.” I had heard his speech hundreds of times (and even helped to write it) so needless to say I knew it well.

Let’s not start polishing that Pulitzer yet. It was literally two sentences. Also, which one did you write? The one where you basically called yourself a better magician than your boss or the one where you described yourself as “gifted”?

Plus, what does he mean “for the first time”? They’ve been doing this over and over for months. Is that just magician theatrics? If I’d edited this book, I would have suggested a line with Zonk thinking that “for the first time” was just showmanship, or I would have had Charles say “in front of an audience.”

The water around  the stage below me began to bubble, and the lights changed color with dramatic precision on cue.

Yeah, I should fucking hope they changed on cue. Since light cues are a thing. Of course, maybe there aren’t light cues in Las Vegas. I wouldn’t know since I’m not an Olympic magician and so much of this is totally true.

In simplistic terms, the illusion used complex deep chaos-based magick; not the simple kind I typically used.

Again, I’m not majhikhaaal like our protagonist here, but I feel like if I wanted to do a big, dangerous thing in an auditorium full of people, and I wanted to do it with precision exactly the same way every time…maybe complex chaos-based majix wouldn’t be the way I’d go with it.

It was dangerous because, if not done correctly, it could backfire.

This is so vague that it could be about anything. Riding a horse is dangerous because if not done correctly, it could proverbially backfire. Cutting your own hair is dangerous because if not done correctly, it could proverbially backfire. Loading a cannon is dangerous because if not done correctly, it could literally backfire. We need detailed consequences if you’re trying to up the stakes.

I had never actually done an illusion that was so hard or complex, and–outside of work–I rarely did them at all.

Um, yes, you have done an illusion this hard and complex. You’ve told us over and over and over and over that you’ve been rehearsing this for months in secret. You and Charles have been designing it and spending all your free time together perfecting it. What the hell were you working on if you weren’t actually performing it?

I took one more long deep breath to clear my head as I listened to Charles continue entrancing the audience.

Again, I’m just calling attention to the bit where she clears her head, as it’s super important and goes woefully unmentioned.

Sofia starts singing–I’m surprised her song wasn’t cut from the show–and we finally get an idea of where Zue Lellen is. No, she’s not on the stage. How silly of me to assume that. She’s up in the friggin’ catwalks again, getting ready to descend from the ceiling like Our Lady Of The Wynn Hotel And Casino for probably the twelfth time of the show.

My hair and clothes rippled as the wind caught them, making a familiar popping noise. My red velvet cloak fluttered as well, but since it was made of heavy velvet it only softly fluttered.

Now, as the illusion goes on, there’s not really any indication as to what, exactly, Load is making happen through her maghik, but thank god we have at least some detail with regards to the intensity of flutter exhibited by her various costume pieces.

Whatever. She says her “feet hit the platform on the stage,” but I don’t know if that’s the platform that Chud Sporperman is yapping on or what. She unhooks her harness, which…uh…she’s fucking maehjikal and the illusion is super secret, but she can’t just dive down like her other illusion? Or fly down?

You know what would have made this book better? A lot of things. But specifically, in this instance, what if all illusions required chaos magic and that’s why Dela or Delilah or whoever is responsible for pushing Zink from her reprehensible loins didn’t want her to go be a part of the show? Because chaos magic-MAGIC WITH A C-is so dangerous and something happened to Chuck and that’s why he left and why he’s so weird with other people?

Whatever, I don’t care, this book is unsalvageable no matter how much rewriting you guys do in the comments.

Even as I sat in front of a packed audience, my mind kept drifting to my conversation with Mac, and I had to keep telling myself that I couldn’t think about it. I coudln’t let myself get distracted  or the whole illusion could go completely sideways. My mind had to be clear and I had to focus on the spell.

See what I mean? If only we had some indication of what state of mind she needs to be in. I feel absolutely lost on that key detail.

I closed my eyes and shook my head a little as I tried to push aside the thoughts of my argument-and what I should tell Mac about who Charles really was to me-aside.

Okay, so again we’ve got confirmation that Zade knows exactly who Chunky Spizzleman is and that Sarem is intentionally keeping the information from the reader in her own point of view. Even in a screenplay, this would be clumsy because the viewer wouldn’t realize there’s a Big Misunderstanding without being in Lim Zimmer’s head.

So, Zart starts waving her hand and that makes the water choppy. The music starts getting heavier to go with the illusion that the band has never seen or rehearsed with before and the lighting changes despite no one being allowed to see the illusion to program it. And Chuddles Sportsman is still running his mouth:

“This illusion has never been performed in front  of anyone, including the crew. It’s a very dangerous illusion for the lovely Zade. If anything goes wrong while we are doing the illusion, she could be lost forever, never to be seen again! So, please, to help her we ask you hold your applause to the end of the illusion.”

Did Zade really write this, or did Lani Sarem breach the barrier between fiction and reality to replace “until” with “to”?

Remember when I said we needed something specific to raise the stakes? Yeah, if it comes in the middle of showboating magician dialogue, it doesn’t work. Again, we don’t know if he’s saying all of this for dramatic effect, or if she could be in real danger. Putting this consequence in the dialogue also doesn’t work if you immediately undermine the danger in the next paragraph:

Though, as I’ve said, there was real truth in what he was saying: it really was a very dangerous illusion, even if his words were mostly scripted to get a specific reaction from the audience.

But what do I know? I’m just a fucking writer.

I was messing with a particular kind of magick-a kind of magick that was both strong and volitile.

I was messing with a particular kind of magick, which I hadn’t quite yet mastered. Chaos magick, is both strong and volitile, as its name implies and is by nature very unpredictable.

No, you’re not experiencing deja vu. Those sentences really do say the exact same thing with many of the exact same words. And yes, they’re presented exactly as they are in the book, without anything left out between them. She just repeats the sentence and dresses it up a little the second time.

Three editors.

It involves pulling power from sources that are, to a certain extent, uncontrollable-kind of like trying to ride a wild horse. In either case, you can do it-and if you really know what you are doing and you do everything right it may go off without a hitch, but one wrong move and it can all go to H-E-double-hockey-sticks real quick. I wouldn’t be “lost forever” as Charles put it (that was there for dramatic flare) but lots of things could go very wrong-and even I really didn’t know just how wrong they could go.

Again, they’ve been doing this for months and she’s never gotten anything wrong? She’s done it exactly right every single time? She has no idea what happens if you don’t get it perfectly right every single time?

The tension in the audience had become palpable, causing a ripple in my concentration.

Maybe you should have planned for the audience being there, what with the fact that you intended to perform this in front of an audience? If there was only a way to try something out before you did it in front of a large group of paying customers. Like, some kind of practice where you’d DRESS in your costume as though the REHEARSAL was a real show. What if you INVITED the people who worked in the theater or a handful of their guests to watch while you did this? Like some kind of, oh, what’s the term a non-theatrical dope like me would make up on the fly…an invited dress rehearsal, maybe? Or even, gosh, a preview for the press who are clamoring outside?

I mean, what do I know? Those probably aren’t even things.

Chandor Spordster tells the audience:

“We call this illusion ‘Creation’, because that is  what we are doing,” […]

All I can think of when I read that phrasing is the scene from Bridget Jones’s Diary where she’s desperately trying not to call her boss “Mr. Titspervert” while introducing him at a work function and she ends up saying he’s the man they all call Mr. Fitzherbert, “Because that…is his name.”

The next part of the illusion is a thunderstorm that sends shivers through the audience and confuses the fuck out of the reader with regards to where the hell anyone is standing on this stage:

The water around the platform I was sitting on began to lap even harder and began to soak into my clothes. I knew this was supposed to happen but, even though I knew, the water still shocked me a little and I shivered. Here we go, I thought, as a huge wave washed over me. From the audience perspective, I had just disappeared, leaving only my cloak, which looked like something that had washed up on a beach.

Did anyone else think she was on the stage with Charles and not some previously unmentioned, fully separate platform in the pool? Because did, because that’s how the scene is written. But there I go, quibbling over nothing, I guess.

Before we get too far, let’s tally up what we’ve seen in this illusion up to this point:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears

We’ll add to that list as we continue along.

The audience’s attention shifted as they began to notice rain beginning to fall, very lightly, from the ceiling to a spot in the middle of the stage.

On-stage rainfall

So much in this chapter “begins” to do something rather than just doing it. The water below her begins to bubble. She begins to make a waving motion and the water begins to move. Then the water begins to lap and begins to soak her clothes. The audience begins to notice that rain is beginning to fall. It’s not just a matter of word repetition here; she’s labeling immediate actions as ongoing processes when it’s not necessary. She doesn’t need to begin to make a waving motion with her hands. “I made waving motions with my hands and the water began to move,” is fine. “The water began to lap even harder and soaked into my clothes,” is fine. “The audience’s attention shifted as they noticed rain falling very lightly from the ceiling to a spot in the middle of the stage,” is fine. If everything is always “beginning” to happen, you’re setting up a delay between the reader and the action. At this point, the illusion might as well have been written in present tense.

As the water hit the ground and splashed up, it turned to sand and started to pile on the stage. The pile grew larger and larger, and I heard someone in the audience scream as lightning rippled from nowhere and one bolt struck the sand.

Like, how dramatic is that audience member that lightning during a thunderstorm portion of a theatrical presentation would cause them to scream?

But let’s add these to our total:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile

Out of the sand rolled a glass sculpture: a life-sized statue of me.

How big is that sand pile? Jesus.

(I wasn’t too fond of the statue part, to be honest–I though it was weird and creepy–but Charles thought it would be a good effect.)

Zimple didn’t want to see a life-sized effigy of herself revealed dramatically on stage? That’s a characterization inconsistency if I’ve ever read one. And we have no indication where Lunk is right now. We know she disappeared from the platform, but where did she disappear to? Where is she narrating this scene from? Just off-stage? Under the stage? Up in the catwalks because the height of theatrical wizardry is, in Lani Sarem’s mind, descending on wires? Where is our protagonist?

At about this point in the illusion, I just barely began to notice that I was starting to feel not-so-great.

 

 

I thought it was because I was allowing the thoughts of what had gone on with Mac to enter my head, and I started to get mad at myself for letting it happen.

So, she began to notice she was starting to feeling a way and then she started to get mad at herself. And none of those filter words are required to make that section work. But let’s not overlook that at least here, she hints at the need for concentration. So far, that hasn’t really been emphasized.

Another bolt of lightning struck the stage, and then an apple tree began to grow quickly and high out of the sand, with apples already heavy on its branches. I heard the audience gasp again. (The apple tree was my idea and I thought it was a great part of the illusion, so their gasp gave me a good boost.) The tree branches began to rust and move before a crack sounded as one of the limbs at the top fell and a handsome young man suddenly tumbled out of the tree and landed at Charles’s feet.

Are you sure he didn’t begin to tumble out of the tree before beginning to land at Charles’s feet?

Illusion so far:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree

Trust me, I’m keeping track of all of this to make a point later. I’m thinking you probably can guess what it is.

Not many people realized it, but the boy looked just like what Charles had looked like when he was a teenager.

So narcissism runs in the family.

Though I assume the guy who fell out of the tree was made out of Khaos Mahajaik or whatever, that’s never mentioned. For all we know, it could just be a dude who bears a striking resemblance to Charles. There’s never any line about how he’s not really there or he’s been conjured by Zamboni’s powerful talent. It’s just, “Oh, there’s a dude here now.” So, a reader could be thinking to themselves, “Wait, isn’t this something only Chunders and Zortly have been working on?” and be as confused over that as I am over someone picking up this book with the intent of reading it for pleasure and getting this far into it.

The guy pulls some apples off the tree and throws them into the audience because hey, why not lob food items pulled from the void via chaotic forces at an audience of unsuspecting people?

Charles continued his narration, letting the audience know that the people who were lucky enough to catch the apples should feel free to eat them and see that they were real. He made sure that they knew that they would be the best apples they’d ever eat.

The best apples. The absolute–look, I’m tellin’ ya. You have never tasted apples like these ones, okay? Believe me. You haven’t. Nobody has. Because they’re the best apples. And I know a lot about apples, okay? Maybe more than the apple farmers do. Trust me.

The magical teen dreamboat cuts down the tree with an ax:

The tree fell straight onto the stage and, as it hits the ground, sparks and fire blew through the wood of the tree.

Sarem wrote the first part of the sentence in past tense and, as she nears the middle of it, flipped to present for no reason and then back to past.

The tree burns up and the sand rises in a big swirl to obscure the burning tree, putting us at:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree
The guy throws apples into the crowd
The guy chops down the tree
The tree catches fire
The sand blows around

When the sand had settled, the fire was gone and in its place there was a beautifully carved wooden wardrobe–he kind that looked like it should have been in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That had always been one of my most favorite books, and I had added that touch as an homage to that story. The young man pulled the doors all the way open to show that the wardrobe was empty, he then shut the doors and reopened them to reveal a guitar. He removed the guitar from the wardrobe and then put the glass sculpture that was sitting next to the wardrobe inside it and closed the doors.

Yes, please, send her ass to Fillory, FFS.

PS: There are a lot of typos in these excerpts. Those aren’t me being careless. This chapter is peppered with them. The three editors had probably already died from exhaustion at this point.

He picked the guitar back up and sat on the ground and began to play a haunting melody that complemented what the band in the theater had been playing.

Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall.”

Zelda listens to him and Sofia singing together and thinks how beautiful Sofia’s voice is, but Zink can’t really enjoy it because she’s in horrible pain through this entire section.

I struggled to bring it all back together and bring the energy and focus back to what I had to do.

Ohhhh, the problem is that she’s not focusing. I get it now. Why wasn’t this mentioned earlier?

 

The wardrobe was struck by lightning and split in two, and the crack of the wood echoed through the theater, giving chills to the audience and momentarily breaking their concentration.

Well, shit, the audience needs to concentrate now, too?

I was now visible again, standing in the middle of the two broken pieces of the wardrobe.

This would be a lot more impressive if we’d had any idea where you were in the first place, Lindt Zuffle. Seriously, she disappeared and reappeared but could see everything happening on stage the entire time, but never once do we hear that she’s in the wings or above the stage or just where the fuck she goes at all.

Then Zade pulls an apple from her pocket and the crowd goes berserk:

I smiled and everyone jumped to their feet, bursting into thunderous applause.

Imagine being so drunk and easy to impress that you give someone a standing ovation because they can fit an apple in their pocket.

Even though we’ve been told several times that Zamantha is in horrific pain and just barely holding on to finish the illusion, she describes giving the audience a “devilish grin” and a wink as she continues. Basically, Zunk is suffering unimaginable torment and performing the illusion is killing her, but she’s super, super good at being tortured, so she toughs it out.

This is the literary equivalent of the last sixteen minutes of Braveheart.

I then playfully took a bite of the apple, and “fainted”. The crowd gasped in horror, not knowing that it was part of the illusion. They thought something was really wrong–just like they were supposed to. The boy caught me as I fell and kissed me, waking me from my “slumber.” I gave the boy my apple, and he took a bite. Suddenly, with a flash of light, he disappeared and the apple fell to the ground.

One of my favorite things about this chapter is how Zwork slowly becomes omniscient as the story goes on. She speaks for the thoughts and feelings of the entire audience at this point, but in the next recap, it will have spread to literally knowing the inner thoughts of every character.

Keeping track of the illusion, we’ve now seen:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree
The guy throws apples into the crowd
The guy chops down the tree
The tree catches fire
The sand blows around
A wardrobe appears
There’s a guitar in the wardrobe
The glass statue goes into the wardrobe
Real Zade comes out
She pulls an apple from her pocket
She eats it and faints
The guy kisses her awake
The guy disappears in a flash of light

Charles picks up Lorne’s cloak (which I guess is just on the stage and not on its own separate platform as described earlier) and puts it on her.

I kept going with the routine, although inside it felt like I was dying.

 

 

Then lightning hits her and she disappears, leaving the cloak behind again.

From the audience’s point of view, this was going exactly as it should. But I had taken the impact of the lightning and I could feel my body burning–which was not supposed to happen.

IDK, from what I understand that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen when you get struck by lightning.

As the lightning strike faded, another apple rolled out on the stage from the arm of the cloak. Charles walked over and picked it up. He took a bite and then he, too, disappeared with a spark of light as the apple fell to the ground.

Obviously, the audience is in raptures, practically tearing their faces off with wonder and cursing God for ever showing them such perfection or whatever. Charles goes out to take his bows (and for a brief cameo by the Wynns), but Lord Of The Zings can’t summon the strength, as she’s being ripped to shreds internally by chaos magic. But put a pin in that for now, because that’s the end of the show and we need a look at our final tally:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree
The guy throws apples into the crowd
The guy chops down the tree
The tree catches fire
The sand blows around
A wardrobe appears
There’s a guitar in the wardrobe
The glass statue goes into the wardrobe
Real Zade comes out
She pulls an apple from her pocket
She eats it and faints
The guy kisses her awake
The guy disappears in a flash of light
Zade disappears in a flash of light
Charles disappears in a flash of light

I’m actually surprised at how well this illusion keeps to the creation theme, to be honest. There’s not a lot to pick apart there. Sarem started out with imagery of the firmaments, the creation of man, the tree of knowledge, she even throws some C.S. Lewis in there with the wardrobe. Of course, the glass statue and guitar playing are out of nowhere, which suggests to me that I might be giving Sarem way too much credit to sticking with a theme when she could have just been throwing together stuff she considers “cool”.

But my major beef with this entire dangerous illusion is that it didn’t need to be dangerous. There isn’t one thing on that entire list that couldn’t have been faked with technical wizardry. Light, sound, and special effects could have created all of this without all the secrecy hoopla. They probably could have even found a carbon-copy of her dad for her to make out with on stage instead of pulling one together from cosmic forces. It would have been…wait for it…an illusion.

What Zoritos and Chuck have done here is just make real things out of magic. They’re not tricking the audience into seeing things that aren’t really there; the things are there. Being able to pull this trick off by making everything real with magic isn’t anywhere near as exciting as it would be if all of it came together through carefully crafted effects. If Lung had simply used magic to correct something or prevent some catastrophe from happening during the illusion, she could still suffer ~*majixkhal*~ consequences and the rest of the chapter wouldn’t have to change.

Plus, it would have been more believable. Right now, Sarem is asking us to believe that all the performers and technicians who have never been allowed to even see this “illusion” are capable of carrying out their jobs perfectly while performing it for the very first time. Is the band making apples appear out of nowhere? No, but they still need to be able to at least rehearse so their playing is timed with what’s happening on the stage. Someone needs to be up in the catwalk at the beginning so Zerp can bend into naively sexy poses while they adjust her harness. There are too many people involved in this for the reader to buy that everything came together without a hitch the first time the whole company performed this.

On top of that, there are incredibly skilled technicians in that theater watching as the stuff they usually do happens without them, and without them having been replaced by other humans operating the controls. Is the lighting effects guy not wondering how all this lightning is happening without anyone doing anything on the board? Is the floor crew confused as to how all these set pieces they’ve never moved or seen backstage are just suddenly appearing? Are all of these people sitting there going, “Well, there must be an entirely separate crew working somewhere we can’t see them?” It wouldn’t make any sense.

But, as this is Zandbook For Lortles, of course, we believe it. We have to, because it’s what Lani Sarem wants and she’s writing this book, not you. And you’re just jealous.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer, the pain had become overwhelming and my whole body was burning like I was on fire from the inside. It was burning all the way through me to my fingertips and it felt like I had swallowed gasoline and then lit a match inside my throat. Somehow I managed to walk–or more like drag–my body the five feet or so over to Zeb–the only person I was in arm’s length of reaching.

In case you were wondering, it’s a burning pain she’s feeling. It burns.

 

Zeb was definitely not my first choice for the person whose arms I would want to collapse into–after all, I’d had some practice with Jackson–but surprisingly there was something about his arms that made me feel safe.

She’s dying from internal majik burns or whatever, but she has a moment to spare a thought about how dreamy Jackson is.

Zeb mumbles words that Zink identifies as not being English and Tad arrives on the scene, followed by Riley.

Tad pointed at Riley, “Riley, call 911! Now!“

While I am annoyed to see “pointed” used as a dialogue tag (you can’t point words out of your mouth), I’m more annoyed with the response to this incident as opposed to the one where Sofia fell sixty feet onto standing water and went into cardiac arrest. Everyone, everyone, except Zade stood around and acted like Sofia was inconveniencing them by dying. They did more work trying to console Riley than they did trying to save Sofia’s life. But Zani faints in the wings and people are screaming for 9-1-1 immediately.

I got my eyes to open and there was Charles standing in front of me, panic stricken. I heard him say, “Oh, God, what do we do?”

Why is Charles a) panic-stricken and b) confused as to what to do next? He knows Linda is maghikal. He’s been aware of it this whole time, and I assume he is also super majikhhhal as well (since they have to bone their own kind or whatever). Did they never, in all their discussions about how dangerous this illusion was going to be, stop and think about what they would do if things went wrong? Why didn’t they have the forethought to make a plan for the worst case scenario?

Zug begs Charles to call her mother, then she passes out, and we’ll pick up the next section in another recap.