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“Impressing your girlfriend’s mother is decidedly not an emergency.
“This is what happens when you enchant yourself immortal instead of dealing with your trauma like a normal person.
An awkward silence passed. Then I peeped: “Small Sade,” and five voices cheered quietly, with Wafa rasping “one of us, one of us,” until my cheeks burned happily.
“That’s a new one,” he said. His eyes danced. “Is that the latest crime the gossips have laid at my door? Tooth Burglar, in addition to Cannibal of Maidens?”
“Tell him we have a beetle problem,” Wafa called after me. “If you are to have reptile gentlemen callers, they might as well make themselves useful.”
But these are a mouthful, and as I hold your lips in highest regard, I would not tire them.
“Polite roaches?” I said dubiously.
We are going shopping.”
mean girls reference?
You believe everything that you have suffered just . . . happens. But in a society, most things happen on purpose. Why not shape the world you live in instead of just existing inside it?”
this is very sociology of him but i like how the book is framing it as dismissive
“Our hands built it,” I murmured, in a breath so long it sang. “We are the beauty.”
“I am beginning to think,” I said, “that standing tall is less useful than standing together.”
She shook her head. “But I am a mother now. You must call me my new name,” she said, smiling at me, then down at her daughter. “You must call me Mamasade.”
actually tearing up
Because for all your praise of commoners, oga . . . you would rather be dead and a hero than alive and nobody.”
Since you are listening, let me ask you: If labor like mine is so crucial to the Realmhood, then why are workers like me treated so badly? And why do we put up with it? Because if we didn’t, of course, we would end up on the street. Because there would always be another orphan, another desperate, hungry soul to take our place. So the Lord Liaos and Mamadeles of the world treat workers however they like. And people become Amenities.
If the wealthy could not survive without menial laborers, I realized, then they would create a world where such workers were always available. Always desperate. Plentiful and ripe for the picking, like fruit at a produce stall.
What would this world be like, I asked them silently, if we shaped it instead?
And there, balancing on a ladder with her tongue stuck out in concentration, stood Dele Balogun.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I growled at the gourd. Then I hurled it away and marched back toward the shrine.
girl is STUBBORN
“Young lady,” he asked, “have we met before?”
You.
The room fell quiet as you entered, standing hesitantly just inside the door.
WOOOOOO
“The debris from that falling shrine must have hit him harder than we thought. He keeps on rambling about ‘getting a job,’ and ‘learning a trade,’ and ‘joining the real world, for once.’
“But your friends have come to see you. Once Ye Eun found out you were brought here, she told them right away. They’ve been in the antechamber ever since, waiting for you to wake up. I will have a servant send them in.” “My . . . friends?” You rise and glide for the exit. “You called them ‘Amenities.’”
TEARING UP
I hail a rickshaw to the Academy District to visit Smallest Sade
SMALLEST !!! SADE !!!
“this is your home, Hand Bell.” She drops a kiss on my temple. “A home should be easy to live in.
Zuri, called Hot Shower,
I will make my mind a safe place I will hold my dreams and yours too I am all the seeds we planted May we always own our multitudes.
I have learned that with the last line, Sade means two things at once. First: that each person is many things, and always will be, no matter how often they are pressured to fit one role or to pursue one future. Second: that there is power in numbers, and a sea of ants can change the world more in a day than a giant can in a lifetime. May you grow to love your ordinary as I have grown to love mine. May we always own our multitudes.
