More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 25 - November 29, 2025
Cora doesn’t even think her aunt loves her that much, yet she loves Delilah’s murderer.
If God cannot love Cora unless she forgives, then Cora will die without His love.
But his fingers hook over the edge of her masks, brushing her lips, the gesture so horrifyingly intimate that Cora’s mind grinds to a halt, every thought gone except the scratch of his rough knuckles on her lips. He pulls down her masks, casts them to the ground, and spits in her face.
i forgot how disgusting american people acted during this time
At the corner of her vision, the crowd parts and she hears her Auntie Lois. “She’s fine,” she hears her say. Someone recounts what happened and Auntie Lois sighs at the great inconvenience.
but she doesn’t think she can survive another medical professional telling her that her mind is a web they cannot untangle.
buys a bottle of ginger ale because she’s getting nauseous but already knows it’s the kind of sickness that starts in her brain and not her stomach.
me
She knows Father Thomas thinks of himself as a good person, that he would never turn Cora away for being Chinese. But he forgives the people who would, even though it’s not his place to dole out forgiveness on Cora’s behalf. He loves the people who would never love her.
“Don’t you mean bats?” the other one says, and they both laugh, the loudest sound they’ve made since sitting down.
WHY AR E THEY EVEN EATING CHINESE FOOD I SWEAR TO GOD RACISTS SHOULD BE BANNED CROM ALL FOOD EXCEPT BOILED CHICKEN AND EVEN FHEN JM SURE JT WASNT WHITE PPL WHO INVENTED IT
“Your uncle doesn’t pay me enough to keep quiet about something like this,” Yifei says. “People need to know, Harvey. I didn’t come to America by myself when I was fifteen just to end up gutted in my own bed with a bat shoved down my throat. I am not going to be one of those bodies that we have to scrape off the ceiling, okay? Because you know damn well that when that happens, all anyone sees you as is a mess, a biohazard, something no one wants to touch. Or worse, I’ll turn into gore porn for weirdos who spend all night on Reddit reading about how another pretty Asian girl got chopped up, and
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
powerful
The world often felt like an endless hallway of doors, and Cora never knew which ones to open.
It was bad enough worrying about one hungry ghost in her apartment, but apparently the ghosts Harvey summoned had finished their rice and wanted more.
yifei is going to destroy harvey lmao
This is why Cora is always quiet—when something actually matters, it matters too much, and everyone can taste it in her words. It scares them, how much it matters to her.
Paisley’s body snaps in half at the rib cage, legs flopping down to the carpet, ribbons of organs twitching as the upper half of her body pulses down Delilah’s throat. Delilah grabs a leg in each hand and holds the rest of Paisley up in the air, feeds her into her mouth with a wet slurp.
BROTHER!!!!!!!!
There’s something peaceful about your worst fear coming true. Cora had hidden from the virus for the last half of a year, the fear of it chained to her at all times, the feeling of needing to cry but not being able to always lodged in her throat, choking her. Now that it’s here, Cora can live through it one minute at a time. It’s no longer the faceless entity of her nightmares. It’s been defanged, as her therapist would say, because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing.
Cora tears up a handful, wishing she could dig a grave and bury herself, shove dirt into her eyes so she doesn’t have to see this anymore, into her mouth so she can’t breathe.
Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other.
