Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 17 The Lovers, or “Shot through the heart/and you’re to blame/darlin’ you give love a bad name”

Wherein Lani Sarem explains how her fraud job was all just a big misunderstanding. Oh, and also everyone in YA is a big meanie and the New York Times caved to their whims. They would have like, totally let the book stay there if not for those meddling kids!

Maybe you’re looking for some Twilight––I mean, Handbook For Mortals––merchandise:

 

When Twilight is your only source of ideas for merch and marketing pic.twitter.com/F2I9Tsdd3M

— Jeannette Editor (@Polar_Bear_Edit) May 1, 2018

We left off with Zit just moments from death in her bedroom back home. Now, let’s journey together through a long-ass story that her mom chooses to tell rather than saving her life.

Dela began to tell Mac the story of how my parents met and how I came into existence.

Okay, let’s just skip over that second part, Dela. We don’t need to hear that, and certainly not through the filter of your daughter.

As I scanned through Mac’s recollection of her telling him the story, I was reminded that my mother can be a magical storyteller, weaving the words of any story into a beautiful tapestry so vivid you’d swear you were watching a motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

Wait a minute. You don’t have to actually write well? You can just tell the reader that your words are really good? What the fuck have I been wasting my time on, then, trying to write decent books with sentences that make sense and aren’t super repetitive? Why have I been laboring tirelessly to improve my craft with each new book, when I could have just told the reader flat out what a great writer I am?

A smile spread across her face and both Mac (who had no idea where the story would go) and Charles (who had lived it with her) both leaned forward to hang on her every word.

They’re so entranced by her cinematic storytelling that they no longer care that the clock is ticking on saving Zumba’s life, apparently.

It was 1977.

Remember the last recap, when you guys were talking in the comments about how weird it was that her parents met in the seventies but she would have had to have been born in the mid-nineties to be in her twenties now? Well, I tried to find some information about the author, namely, her age. Because we know that Zard is Lani, has always been meant to be Lani, and that Lani even went so far as to cast herself in the lead role of Zuck in the film version, I saw 1977 and got suspicious. It was surprisingly difficult to find an age for her listed anywhere, but a modeling profile puts her at thirty-six. No birthdate listed. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that she lowballs her age publically and that she was born in 1978, based on the fact that she seems unable to separate herself from the character and as such can’t stand to alter the book’s timeline from her own. It probably never occurred to her that Zud couldn’t be in her twenties in the book if her parents got down together in the seventies, because that would be when she was conceived and she is Zarck.

The setting now is a traveling circus, complete with that g-word slur.

In one of the smallest tents sat a gorgeous, young girl who was wearing a beautiful long skirt of vibrant colors that rippled as it fell toward the ground, her brown sandals peeking through past the hem of her skirt. One leg crossed over the other, she was swinging her foot slowly. Her off-white cotton top had slipped off her left shoulder and the front was open just enough to show a little bit of cleavage.

Remember also during the last recap, when you guys were discussing in the comments that Lani not only has to be Zanadon’t, but also Hey There Delilah? You were bang-on with that. Now that Zagnut isn’t there to be the center of attention, the mother has to become Sarem’s avatar, as evidenced by the fact that aside from Zalt And Lepper, no other characters receive this level of detail when they’re described. For example, the first appearance of Charles in this flashback reads like this:

Her long hair fell in front of her face and blew slightly when the tent flap opened and in walked a young and very handsome man.

Young and very handsome. Charles is arguably an equally important character in the scene, but he gets two adjectives in comparison to the paragraph Dela got describing her clothes, shoes, posture, and cleavage.

Dela, just eighteen at the time, didn’t even bother to look up.

If Dela is eighteen in 1977, that makes her fifty-nine in the present, meaning that for Lindt Zuffles to be twenty-five, Dela and Charles would have to have been in their mid- and late thirties when they had their ill-advised young love. We know how old Charles is now, too:

Twenty-year-old Charles […]

Making Charles sixty-one…

Now, you’ll notice that Copperfield’s birthdate is 1956, meaning that in 1977, he would have been twenty-one. So obviously, Copperfield and Spopperfield are two different, distinct persons. Don’t worry, that’ll get taken care of later. Right now, I want to focus on this, just a few paragraphs down:

Dela still hadn’t looked up, while the boy who was known as Charles […]

He’s twenty! He’s a twenty-year-old man. He’s not a boy! There is such gross, gross age stuff going on in this book, in terms of language.

Anyway, in all of that, Dela asks Charles why he’s there, and he’s like, you’re a psychic, you should know why I’m here, which has to be like, the most annoying joke to a psychic.

Though she still hadn’t looked up, Dela knew that he was tall and handsome, with tick and wavy dark brown hair, his piercing blue eyes glancing around the room.

Dela is telling this story, so it’s default in Dela’s POV. If she didn’t see him glancing around the room, she can’t tell us that he’s glancing around the room. Full stop.

This whole time, Dela is laying cards out on a table and reading them, but we never learn what she’s reading about, just that she’s flipping over cards. She tells Charles that she doesn’t see something if she’s not trying to, and he asks her what she means by that.

Dela finally looked up and made a huffing noise, exasperated; she shot him a look while scrunching her nose. He found the annoyed Dela to be very cute somehow and thought she looked utterly adorable when she scrunched her nose. He had noticed how stunningly beautiful she was the first time he had met her but they hadn’t exactly hit it off then.

Again, Dela is telling this story. Which means she’s telling Mac and Charles what Charles is thinking inside his head. She’s also describing at length how attractive she is. Not only is that weird, it’s just plain not possible from her POV, especially since she’s already told Charles that she can’t see things she’s not looking for. So, unless Dela is using her psychic powers to find out if Charles thinks she’s cute, she can’t tell us any of this.

We find out that Dela thinks Charles is pretentious and she refers to him as a “so-called celebrity,” which makes me wonder why he’s working at a circus if he’s already famous. But whatever.

Charles––even at that young age––was not used to girls who didn’t immediately fall all over themselves in front of him. He didn’t know how to deal with a girl who didn’t care. He also didn’t believe in what she did and he didn’t understand how she could take herself seriously.

So, Charles sounds like a real winner, huh? POV skew aside, I’m sure this is meant to show us what a pig Charles used to be, so we can see how much he’s changed now. And by “so we can see,” I mean, “so the author can tell us” because so far, he’s still treating women like worthless objects. All of his behavior toward Sofiaeoeouuuu is going to be either justified by some bad action on her part or we’re going to be expected to just pretend we didn’t read about it.

Charles was so busy thinking about how he might charm her that he almost didn’t pay attention to her response––which would have annoyed her more (which he would have found also cute and therefore might have been a win-win for him either way).

Whose POV are we in? Are we in Charles’s POV, or Dela’s, since she’s telling the story? Of course, we’re in neither. We’re in Zwiss Chard’s omniscient POV because god forbid she not be the focus of even her parents’ meet-cute.

Dela tells him that being a psychic is like being in a house and looking out the window to see what’s outside. If she could see everything all the time, she would be overloaded and go insane.

Charles tells Dela to focus on him and tell him why he’s there. The reason he’s there, as revealed by our omniscient narrator, is that he’s trying to figure out how Dela manages to trick people into believing that she’s psychic. She makes a crack about how she’s being tested by him, but agrees to read his cards, anyway. And to prove that Dela really is mystical and powerful and majikkahlly delicious, we get this:

Dela couldn’t help but notice that, when he sat, he loooked exhausted. He almost melted into the chair. Across the table from him, Dela also noticed the deep, almost black looking circles that were under his pretty blue eyes, and she could see that his skin looked dehydrated and showed some redness––all signs of a lack of sleep.

Leaving aside for the moment that his pretty blue eyes and dark circles are across the table from him, Dela: Psychic Dermatologist is doing what we in the business call a “cold reading.” A cold reading is something fraud psychics do; they pick something obvious and ask leading questions like, oh, I don’t know…

“Are you sick?” she asked without looking up.

and, when Charles says he doesn’t think he’s sick:

“Having trouble sleeping?”

If you want to see an example of a cold reading, check out any John Edwards video on YouTube. He’s one of the worst, most obvious cold reading frauds because he sets himself up as a medium communicating with the dead, so he’s already got people who are highly emotional and willing to believe they’re actually communicating with their loved ones because they want to believe. He’ll say something like, “Someone passed away in a car accident,” and a person in the audience will obviously know someone who died in a car accident, because, duh, car accidents are common. Or, he’ll say, “I’m getting a message from someone, starts with a J…starts with a J…I’m getting a Jessica or a Jennifer,” which are both incredibly common names. When he manages to get someone to answer, he continues to ask questions like, “Was there a lot of tension in the family following her passing?”, that will obviously apply to literally any death. Maybe the person in the audience who knows Jessica is wearing a breast cancer awareness pin. “Did Jessica pass away from breast cancer?” Yes, how amazing that he picked up on that detail! People then pour out more and more information so that he can narrow his specific answers. Yes, they know a Jessica. Yes, there was a lot of tension in the family following her passing because her brother decided to turn off her life support and some of the other family members disagreed with that decision. They’ll tell John that detail about the life support, then he’ll ask a question about it phrased in such a way that confirmation bias will convince the grieving person that he supplied those details. I’ve never been able to figure out how people fell for him because he’s just so super clumsy and obvious.

Anyway, that’s what Dela is doing in this passage. She’s looking at Charles, taking in details about his physical appearance and presenting them as though she’s getting the information psychically. In other words, it’s possible that the author of this book is such a con artist herself, she can’t write an honest character.

Charles isn’t falling for it:

That could be a good guess, he thought. I have deep circles under my eyes and I look sleepy. Not impressed yet.

Me neither.

Want more evidence that Dela cold reads?

“You’re having nightmares.” This time she didn’t ask but told him; she was pleased that she could get some information about him so clearly and quickly. She knew that each time she read for someone new the person could turn out to be an “easy read” or a hard one.

I mean. If that doesn’t sound sketch…

Well, that’s a very logical reason for not being able to sleep, so I’m still not impressed.

But don’t worry, dear readers. Dela is the real deal.

After a few moments, with her eyes still tightly shut, she reached out and grabbed Charles’s hand. She gripped it hard and both of them felt the jolt of energy.

If she’s able to just touch someone and tell their fortune that way, why does she need the cards?

Dela tells Charles specifically what his nightmares are about: getting shot in the chest.

Charles’s eyes got big, and he shook his head a little in disbelief. He ran his fingers through his soft and silky hair and his eyes shifted away from hers.

Does anybody really stop to think about how soft and silky their hair is when they’re disturbed by an uncanny experience? Or is this Zambot telling us about her dad’s hair and how soft and silky it is? Not knowing whose POV we’re in, either Charles is super vain or Zuul is telling us about her hot dad.

Charles tells Dela that she’s hit the nail on the head. But he calls her Dely, and you know how the author of this book feels about mispronouncing names.

“Don’t call me, Dely. You know I hate that. I don’t serve sandwiches,” she snapped at him.

Why does he call her Dely in the first place? It’s not like it’s a shorter version of Dela. It’s exactly the same number of letters and syllables. It’s like Sofia’s nickname being Sofie. It doesn’t make any sense.

Charles tells her that she should give away free sandwiches with every reading to increase sales, which they both find very funny.

She couldn’t help but notice how amazing his smile was and how handsome he was––not handsome, actually, but stunningly gorgeous as she watched his amazing beautiful blue eyes light up. He’s funny, too, apparently, she realized.

Good for her, because I’ve yet to realize it, myself. Will there be proof of his hilarity at some point?

One good thing about this chapter is that Sarem doesn’t go into detail about the cards in the spread, so I don’t have to bore you all with a half-hour long video ranting about shitty tarot. All we’ve gotten at this point in the reading is that she’s shuffled the cards and laid down “three more” after we’re told she’s “stacking them in sets of three.” So, it looks like it’s another “just turn over cards until they say something you want them to say” scenario. Like I said, at least she doesn’t go into detail. Charles just looks at the “colorful” pictures on the cards and the “subtle details that seem to point to hidden meanings.” He asks her how she got all that stuff about his nightmare from pictures.

“I’m both clairvoyant and clairaudient. ‘Clairoyant’ you may have heard of. It means you can see things like they’re happening on a TV show. ‘Clairaudient’ means you can hear it just like when you listen to he radio. The cards are tools, but I can see and hear things too. I saw your nightmare just like you do.”

Clairvoyant doesn’t mean you can see things absolutely clearly like they’re being acted out in front of you. For some people, yes, that’s the case. For others, it’s just snippets of mental images or even just persistent thoughts of a certain number or symbol. One of my second cousins is clairvoyant and she knew that her husband had died because she had a vision of leaves and knew exactly what that vision was showing her. Clairvoyance is rarely like how it’s portrayed in the movies. Clairaudience is usually described as hearing the voices of the dead or spirit guides inside your head. I personally feel clairaudience is the most common form of psychic ability. Almost everyone I know (who doesn’t think all psychics are delusional frauds) has had a clairaudient experience. But what both of these things are? Not like they’re being described in the book.

Dela asks Charles if he wants to know what the dream is about, and he’s like, yeah, duh, obviously.

“Shuffle the cards then,” she said as she leaned foward. In her hand she was holding a well-worn deck; he could tell she had been using it for quite a while.

Now, here’s an example of how to not sprinkle your description in. Charles has already looked at all of these cards closely to the point of examining small details. Now, he’s noticing that the deck is worn? That’s a macro detail. The hidden symbols in the illustrations are a micro detail. Don’t describe micro details before macro details unless there’s a good reason, i.e., Wil Graham noticing a missing cat that nobody’s brought up yet.

Dela hadn’t asked Charles to shuffle the deck before, but she has reasons for him to do it now:

“I was just looking at the present. That’s the easy part. I need to look at the past and future now. If you put your energy into the cards it will be much easier. They don’t bite, I promise. I may, but they don’t.” She knew how to be witty as well.

Did she, though?

Charles laughed a little at her joke and, being a twenty-one-year-old guy, he was instantly intrigued to find out if she really did bite.

Screeching brakes. He was twenty earlier in this scene. How long does Dela take to do a reading? And remember when I told you not to worry about Charles not being David Copperfield because it would be corrected later? There you go.

Dela could tell he was nervous, but she didnt know that it was both because he was not completely convinced the cards wouldn’t bite––and he was also still wondering if she might.

The first rule of comedy is: if you find a joke that makes only you laugh, repeat it over and over until it’s even less funny than it was the first time.

“Clear your mind and do your best to keep it clear for the next few minutes. Try not to focus on any one thing or let your mind wander if you can,” Dela instructed him.

Charles was starting to believe her, but he wasn’t sure how to fake not wearing the vest while actually wearing the vest.

If you can figure out how to fake sawing someone in half or cutting them into three sections in a cabinet or floating them in the friggin air, you can figure out how to disguise a bulletproof vest. Or, I don’t know, make it part of the act, like Penn and Teller do. Either way, there’s nothing stopping her from just shooting you in the face. Maybe pick a plan that doesn’t involve allowing your stalker to aim and fire a gun at you.

Dela basically has the same reaction I did, which was, okay, well, don’t wear it and die. Then an old woman comes in for her psychic appointment, Charles kisses Dela’s hand––which of course he’s a friggin hand kisser, why wouldn’t he be?––and leaves and the chapter ends.