More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
my appreciation for Puzo’s book and Coppola’s filmscomes not from the fact that the characters are gangsters, but the fact that they are a family (who happen to be gangsters).
The term epic fantasy conjures an expectation of vast continents, kingdoms and armies, the rise and fall of nations. But there is also an epic scale to be found in a single life. In the seasons of a marriage. In seeing one’s children grow into adulthood. In passing hopes and dreams, as well as burdens and sorrows from one generation down to another.
It turns out I wasn’t quite done with the Kaul family after all. But perhaps, they are done with me. After everything tragic and triumphant they’ve been through, they deserve their rest.
“There’s a cost to every decision we make, Mada, but the further we go for the clan, the more we give. You should remember that. Ask yourself: How far are you willing to go?”
“One evening, we argued again about selling my jade, our worst fight yet. He hit me and grabbed me, with Anden right in front of us, watching. He tried to pull the jade off my neck.” Ure stopped and turned her face aside. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rest.” She’d reacted with too much of her Strength and put her husband through a wall, breaking his arm and collarbone. After he got out of the hospital in a cast, he’d left the country without speaking to her.
GOOD
What made this twenty-four-year-old think she could ignore the messy reality of people’s relationships and bully her way into the optimal outcome that suited her?
I deliberately refrained from writing Ayt Mada as a point of view character anywhere in the Green Bone Saga, not because she wasn’t worthy, but because it would be just like her to take over the narrative. Ayt Madashi is an all-or-nothing person.
At times Lan wished he had a sibling closer to his own age, someone who he could talk to about the particular pressures that came with being a Kaul in a way that none of his friends could ever understand—but then he looked at Hilo and Shae and thought perhaps he was better off as he was.
LMFAO
It was a common trait of the Maik siblings, perhaps, to be unusually devoted and resilient. To not lie down, and to take no shit from the world.
No matter how much jade Kaul Sen awarded to his granddaughter, no matter how many parties he threw for her or how much he bragged about his “best grandson” to his friends, he could not, even as the Pillar of the clan, give her true greenness, the simple respect accorded by and to men, friends and enemies alike, honestly earned.
