Ordinary Monsters (The Talents Trilogy #1)

by J.M. Miro

learn more about the orsine, and the terrors loose beyond it, than almost any other talent in the world. But for now all of that would remain shrouded in mystery.

Then why mention it? Let us find out when we get there.

“I know what you look like, Mr. Ovid. You are not the only foreigner at Cairndale.” He paused, looking at her blindfolded eyes, angry at her rebuke.

That's a rebuke?

“Indeed, Mr. Ovid,” she said. “One thing at a time. If you are ready?” “Right,” said Charlie, trying to keep the anger from his voice. “I’m ready.”

Why would this make him mad?

the crows rising as one out of the stubble fields, quick and crackling like thought, exactly like what she imagined thinking was like;

Wut?

Charlie heard Ribs go to the big wooden cabinet against the wall, fiddle with the drawers. All at once a long heavy line of folders slid out into the air, staggered, tottered, dropped unsteadily to the floor.

Didn't she have Charlie's blood on her hands? And she’s going to be touching paper?

And the first thing she noticed, when she unlocked the iron gates and crossed the covered carriage yard and entered through the grand doors of 23 Nickel Street West, ushering her companion inside, was that someone had just been there.

And

The stones underfoot gleamed in the weak light.

the five of them, ghostly and pale in their robes

This is the third time you've mentioned how ghostly they look in their robes.

there was about it a sense—an aura—of absolute calm that didn’t fit with the fallen or the destitute. It needed nothing.

Clearly it needs to eat.

We will ask your assistance tomorrow night; we will go out into the city, looking for the one we seek.

No you won't.

They did not go out again for several nights.

What happened to going out the next night?

After nightfall, Alice drew on her heavy oilskin coat and tied her hair back and pulled her hat low over her eyes.

And.

against a wagon and she kicked it down and dragged it across and leaned it up.

And

trailed by Oskar’s giant, Lymenion.

Yes, we know his name. You don't have to keep telling us.

He went to one of the doors in his study and unlocked it and lit a lantern from a sconce on the wall and began to descend.

And

I saw you, too, but you had that symbol, the one from your ring, and it was glowing in your hand. In your palm. Like the glove we saw but you weren’t wearing the glove, and like it was on fire.

Spoiler alert. Edit: i’m not even going to mark this as a spoiler because it’s an utterly useless vision that tells us nothing. I actually forgot about this.

In that other world, he’d found him. Just as the drughr had promised. And now there was no unfinding, no going back, he had to live with what he had seen. It had solved nothing.

I could have told you that.

He would steal the shining boy away, far away, to some place where no one could hurt him, not Berghast, not the drughr, not anyone at all.

Oh but the talents right there have to die. You're so thoughtful Marber.

there had been a prophecy long ago, from a glyphic in a cave in Bulgaria: a child would be born in the other world, in the land of the dead, a living child who would cut the fabric of the worlds and remake the talents in his own image.

Ugh, now there's a prophecy involved.

30 THE UNDER—TUNNEL

Why did the author even bother with chapter titles?

He was thinking about the two children at the river, the sounds of the drughr feeding. He gave a small shudder. There is nothing you could have done, he told himself.

Uh, excuse me, but there's a substantal list of things you could have done. Most of them preventative.

He’d always been the bold one, of course, the clever one, Bertolt had,

Clearly.

They had done nothing to help him, to bring him back from that other world, to offer him refuge when he’d glimpsed the true nature of the drughr and recoiled in fear.

Uh, how were they supposed to? And multiple people have reached out to help you.

But in his mind it was his brother’s death that changed him, that opened him, in time, to the drughr.

Its called trauma and the draghr used it against you.

31 THE BEGINNING

Why. Did. You. Bother. With. Chapter. Titles.

It was not the child’s welfare of course but everything the child represented—the possibility of power, of redemption—that drew both the drughr and Henry himself to it,

Its not very interesting being just told this.

Jacob caught a glimpse of the three of them—himself, Walter, the baby—in a tall clouded mirror standing near a window. Apparitions, each one.

Reflections. Stop being so dramatic.

When Oskar had put his shoe back on and stood in it gingerly and looked at Ribs in relief

And

and she looked pleased at the prospect and fiddled with her unruly red hair and licked a finger and smoothed out her eyebrows as if that would make a difference.

And

His side whiskers were long and wet like a dog’s fur and when he grimaced the water squeezed from them.

Do I really need a second, different description of his mustache.

“Do you know what that is?” he demanded. “What it will make possible, what Berghast will do with it?

Snap half the population away?

Alice went back for the lantern and walked ahead and set the lantern carefully down and then went back and dragged Mrs. Harrogate farther.

And

Alice did not know fear but she’d known it when the drughr screamed.

Oh shut up, everyone knows fear. And you've expressed fear plenty of times in this book!

his arm was coming down again, and then a searing pain filled her head and her eyes rolled back up in her skull and all at once everything went blessedly, painlessly, soundlessly, dark.

And

a strange artifact of gleaming iron and gleaming wood.

Gleaming

He could just make out the mist moving across it. Like the spirit dead, he thought dimly, though it was nothing like the spirit dead, not really.

Ok

And then, when he said nothing more, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were as soft as flowers. He stared in surprise.

You have no chemistry!

He caught Bailey’s face in the mirror, watching. “We must be like water, Bailey,” he murmured. “We must be clean, and empty.”

. . . but most water is neither clean nor empty. What are you, some emo teenager.

the Cairndale grounds and she unlatched the window and reached a hand out and banged on the roof for the driver to stop.

And

And beneath that, the beautiful folding patterns of smoke. “Show me,” he whispered to the glove. “Show me what I seek.”

Why does a glove do this?

he fell back, blinking, the feel of his own skin rolling over him like a hand over a mouth.

This . . . isn't a good metaphor.

If the talents were its sustenance, the exiles were its toxin.

Sure, whatever.

He ran a slow hand over his shaved scalp and saw in the window his watery reflection do the same.

Yeah, that's what reflections do.

Charlie couldn’t make out his eyes because of the shadows but his chin was down so that his beard spilled out over his chest like an apron of darkness.

I'll only accept someones beard being described as an apron of darkness as a jest. I just can't take this seriously. I mean, we know he has a beard. Did this really need description.

There were figures in the slumped in the gloom,

the pain staggering. And yet his heart leaped. He had done it; he had done the mortaling.

Ah yes, the great struggle to do the thing we only recently learned about.