More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This mayor is an angel; the last couple of mayors have all been angels. Not like a from-heaven, not-quite-real type of angel but a from-behind-and-inside-and-in-front-of-the-revolution, therefore-very-real type of angel.
sentencing them to restitution and rehabilitation. Many people thought it wasn’t enough; but the angels were only human, and it’s hard to build a new world without making people angry.
You try your best, you move with compassion, you think about the big structures.
In the meantime, the angels banned firearms, not just because of the school shootings but also because of the kids who shot themselves and their families at home; the civilians who thought they could shoot people who didn’t look like them, just because they got mad or scared or whatever, and not...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The angels believed and the people agreed that there was a good amount of proper and deserved shame in history and some things were just never going to be things to be proud of.
Some were statues of the dead, mostly the children whose hashtags had been turned into battle cries during the revolution.
(because, as the angels pointed out, you shouldn’t use a nation as a basis to choose which deaths you mourn; nations aren’t even real),
people who died because the monsters took away their health care—names
countless letters recording that t...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
They’d remember the marches and vigils, the shaky footage that was splashed everywhere of their deaths (a thing that wasn’t allowed anymore, that gruesome dissemination of someone’s child gasping in their final moments, bubbling air or blood or grief—the angels respected the dead and their loved ones).
Remembering was important.
They mentioned religious books, but with reluctance, not wanting to influence the children. Religion had caused so many problems before the revolution, people were hesitant to talk about it now.
Her hands were a blur as she signed,
Eeeeek love
“You know that’s what a lot of religion was, right? Just made-up things used to scare people so they could control us better.”
Give Moss a kiss for me. He scoffed. “I’ll try, but that boy thinks he grown now.” Too grown for kisses?? “That’s what I said.” Redemption threw up his hands as he headed off. “Talk soon, love you!” Love you!
Ugh the lack of toxicity just in this interaction this whole intro is lik aarefreshing if only
She loved being in the library, the almost sacred silence you could find there, the way it felt like another home.
Even though Ube hadn’t said she should, Jam considered pulling on the white gloves nestled in the reading desk drawers to use in looking through the books,
Jam’s mother had been born when there were monsters, and Jam’s grandmother had come from the islands, a woman entirely too gentle for that time. It had hurt her too much to be alive then, hurt even more to give birth to Jam’s mother, whose existence was the result of a monster’s monstering. This grandmother had died soon after the birth, but not before naming Jam’s mother Bitter. No one had argued with the dying woman. Bitter knew her name was heavy, but she hadn’t minded, because it was honest. That was something she’d taught Jam—that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were
...more
and eventually how Bitter would stop moving altogether, her shoulders settling like a bird landing and folding in its wings. Her long neck would curve back, raising her face, and she’d look straight at Aloe, and her smile would be like a whole new day starting.
Bitter’s face was smudged with a couple of different white paints: a bright white that seemed holy; a duller, slightly yellowed ivory, as if a magical tusk had touched her forehead; a cream trailing dry and broken down her neck.
“Painting?” Jam asked. Bitter was one of the few people she voiced with.
manywhite
Angels weren’t supposed to look like this. They were supposed to be good, and how could something good look like this?
Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.”
“You can’t sweet-talk a monster into anything else, when all it does want is monsterness. Good and innocent, they not the same thing; they don’t wear the same face.”
“It’s good to think about the angels like so,” she said. “Critically, yes? Can’t believe everything everyone tells you, even in school, it’s good to question.
Jam sighed and freed her hands from her mother’s so she could say the words, lifted from an old Gwendolyn Brooks poem, words the angels had used when they gave Lucille back to itself. A revolution cry. We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond. “Yes, child. Angels aren’t pretty pictures in old holy books, just like monsters aren’t ugly pictures. It’s all just people, doing hard things or doing bad things. But is all just people, our people.”
Bitter often joked to Jam that her father moved like a functioning disaster, clumsy and charming and breaking at least one breakable thing a week.
Jam always felt lucky when she stood in the path of her father’s joy.
When Jam was a toddler, she’d refused to speak, which was why they’d taught her to sign instead. She used her hands and body and face for her words but saved her voice for the most important one—screamed out during her first and only temper tantrum, when she was three, when someone had complimented her for the thousandth time by calling her “such a handsome little boy” and Jam had flung herself on the floor under her parents’ shocked gazes, screaming her first word with explosive sureness. “Girl! Girl! Girl!” Bitter had stared before laughing. “All right, sweetness,” she’d said, looking at the
...more
Bitter laughed, then taught her how to do breast self-exams and talked to her about fertility options.
“You know you’re still a girl whether you get surgery or not, right? No one gets to tell you anything different.”
Her father held more fear than her mother, Jam had always known this.
His arms were live branches, growing around her.
Forget the monsters. He hadn’t meant anything strong by it. Just to comfort his daughter, prompted by an old fear, by echoes of memories of what people used to do to girls like her. But an echo of a memory is not the same as a memory, and a memory is not the same as a now,
So, yes, people forget. But forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.
She was playing ragas now, haunting things full of sitar and tabla and sarod.
so she decided to voice,
I love the use of voice over speak
The feathers extended all the way down its back, and she stared at the patterns in awe. This was something from the other side of the painting, the parts Bitter’s brushes hadn’t touched. It was weird to see that they were real anyway. Jam wondered if it was the thing who got to decide what was on the other side, or if what was there had always just been there, or if Bitter’s imagination had built it.
Jam glared at the creature before realizing it couldn’t actually see her, then resolved to pull the damn thing out just so she could glare at it properly.
leaving a distinct residue of disappointment on her fingers. It was creepy to feel a feeling as if it was a substance,
The same Bitter who wouldn’t let Jam get a pet had gone and called up a monster. The thing’s head jerked at that, and its fur crackled stiff. Not a monster, it snapped.
Well, little girl, it replied, I suppose you can call me Pet.
Pet scoffed deep in its throat and flipped through a pile of charcoal sketches. “Nice. Not one of my concerns in this life, to be nice, to sound nice, what is nice.”
and Jam watched its hands, Bitter’s dead hands, touching the sketches that had been drawn by Bitter’s alive hands, which had painted these dead hands, which were putting down the sketches drawn by the hand that painted them.
Pet’s footsteps were singing through the floor like mallets striking an ocean of drumskin,
Bitter turned her head to glare at her husband, and Jam could almost smell her mother’s temper as it began to stir, boiling in her chest under her silk nightgown.
Whenever she was really scared or freaking out, the same thing always happened: she began to dissociate, reality loosening around her like a hammock deconstructing itself, spilling her out into sands of nothingness.
He said it like it was a prayer he was clutching in both hands.
Pet hummed, a light vibration shaking through the room. I don’t know yet, I am rife with unknowns, part of the hunt is to make the not-known known. Not just to me, or us, but to the not-knowers, so that they may know, the truth is in the knowing.
