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I knew that Jane built herself up again but I had no idea that it involved nearly dying from exposure after fleeing Thornfield. This whole scene of her quitting Thornfield underlines just how difficult it would be for a woman to leave a toxic employer, let alone the romance, and why it was important for her to leave rather than let her baser passions master her into accepting a marriage-free relationship.

It’s finally out, with 150 pages left to detail the aftermath and how Rochester and Jane come back together. Bertha is such a wildly unsympathetic character as Rochester paints her as a villain who is somewhat responsible for her own insanity. He is remorseful in his attempt to be a bigamist and Jane is very shrewd in her perceptions of how she sees this relationship going forward.

There is a lot of wisdom in this 50 pages with Rochester confessing his love. In response to the proposal: “me who have not a friend in the world but you—if you are my friend: not a shilling but what you have given me?” Let alone Mrs. Fairfax’s sage advice and Rochester admitting that he only had the Ingrams over in a bid to rouse Jane’s jealousy.

I’m kind of spoiled that I know how this is going on but the revelation with the fortune-teller caught me off guard! Jane is now twice complicit in covering up attempted murders by someone who she believes she knows. She has also more or less made up her mind about Rochester as she has internalized, from his semi-joking sparring, that he is going to marry the Ingram harpy.

40% of the way in and we don’t beat around the bush. Jane loves Rochester and Rochester obviously loves Jane, but Jane is steeped in self-denial about everything, because how can she afford to entertain the love of her employer? Ask we get the first major step in the shadow plot: the attempted murder by fire of Rochester.

The appearance of the lords at the manor is such a weird feel.

The Rochester / Eyre sparring has definite Lizzie and Darcy vibes in its sort of animosity except the context, given that Rochester is the EMPLOYER, is VERY different. It also reads quite different and gross now, given that Rochester is 38 and Jane is 18, with Rochester highlighting during these early verbal sparring matches that he is old enough to be Jane’s father. Nevermind what we don’t know in the attic!!!

The orphanarium episode ends with Jane pursuing a governess position as she is not looking to be her own master, comfortably dedicating herself to the school, but wants a change in her servitude. The visit by Bessie is a nice way of tying up the Gateshead action by at least acknowledging Eyre’s past relatives. I wonder if they’ll come up again during the novel? The bit with her other uncle seems to suggest this.

Lots of suffering. If I read these portions when I was in World Lit then I must have glazed over it. Jane is the orphan child being raised by her deceased uncle’s ungracious family. She has one sympathetic soul at the house and that’s it, and when she escapes, it’s to a charity boarding school for other orphans. So, she has something in common with all of these girls, though she may not immediately see it.

“Harlequin’s Lane”

The final Mr. Quin story finally puts some teeth into this Quin mythos. The confrontation between Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Quin at the end is easily the highlight of this collection but I don’t think that it would carry the same weight without having read through the previous eleven tales. Like, whatever I may have thought about the others, the final story is one hell of a topper.

“The World’s End”

This is like the most do-nothing of a story where Mr. Satterthwaite averts a suicide based on a woman’s lover having been falsely accused of theft resulting in his imprisonment. This story does not have any sort of plain crime to it, just a scatterbrained woman who had no idea that she had hidden her own jewel.

“The Bird With the Broken Wing”

Mr. Quin contacts Mr. Satterthwaite through a supernatural parlour game. This prompts him to take a dinner invitation that he was going to ghost. He is enchanted by a fey lady who plays the ukulele. It turns out that the ukulele is very integral to both the murder plot and how Satterthwaite solves it. So goofy but fun, I mean murder notwithstanding

“The Dead Harlequin”

This is part romance, part ancient murder mystery, unraveling the facts around a suicide. This story is mostly carried by the dynamic between Mr. Satterthwaite and the young artist, Bristow, which has a nice, tidy ending. For a second I thought that Satterthwaite was the only one who could see Mr. Quin in this story, but it was only him looking for where he wanted Mr. Quin to be:

“The Face of Helen”

LOL. Mr. Satterthwaite gets involved in a love triangle where the jilted lover has a plot to kill the beautiful woman who didn’t pick him by storing deadly gas in a glass that will crack when a singing program reaches a climax with a resonating high note. This story lets the reader put together the clues long before Satterthwaite starts to collate all that he knows.

“The Voice in the Dark”

I actually figured this one out (but not WHY the villain was where they were, didn’t think about that much)! It’s a whirlwind of goofiness that includes a wrecked cruise ship, a haunting, a medium who speaks as a Native American caricature, amnesia, and an inheritance plot. Christie sort of gave up writing after Satterthwaite made the plot, abruptly killing the villain off.

“The Man From the Sea”

This is another romance, with Satterthwaite engaging two middle-aged expatriate English people who are still in love with each other and don’t know of each others’ existence and are planning to commit suicide for their own separate reasons. The resolution is very tidy, and very fairy-tale like as befits these magical stories.

“The Soul of the Croupier”

Quin and Satterthwaite barely do anything, here, except arrange a dinner party that clears the air between two pairs of lovers, one young and one old. It’s interesting as a log of how Christie characterized young Americans, going so far as to define a Midwesterner and his very self-possessed girlfriend.

“The Sign in the Sky”

This is a fun one. Mostly because of how it starts to develop Satterthwaite’s character. He starts to show his little old man-ishness when he frets at traveling to Canada in order to exonerate a young man convicted of murder. He is also less trusting of Quin’s counsel… or more pointedly, he is put out that it doesn’t feel like he is just being handed the solution.

“At the “Bells and Motley””

A bottle-piece where Quin directs Satterthwaite to recount what he knows of a now year-old drama, arriving to a conclusion which will reveal an account of fraud and exonerate a young man, freeing him to be married to the woman he loves. The dynamic is like if you broke up Poirot’s mental process, with Quin the rational mind that processes the facts that Satterthwaite knows.

“The Shadow On the Glass”

This one has another ghost story, about a pane of glass that, even after being replaced, assumes the image of a person looking out through it. Quin is a very late visitor in this one, but he now has a track record of exonerating two women who were wrongly suspected of murder. The actual solution feels a bit far-fetched, but I don’t know how accurate pistols were in the late 20s.

“The Mysterious Mr. Quin”

Okay, it’s unbelievably refreshing to see Christie step away from her detective format to this story. Harley Quin is a supernatural being, an immortal who arrives at a British manse in order to guide people to the facts behind a suicide that occurred some years ago in order to prevent an innocent woman from killing herself.

I put this down at the doctor’s office with only two pages to go?? This book has got a backend between the glossary and the sneak peek at book 3 let me tell you what—

This was a great way to tidy up the elements spun off from the first book though the story with Kleisch came up and then finished up very neatly, the only lingering question being who Vasya’s great grandmother is.

Well that escalated quickly. These character beats for Vasya are all within the bounds of a young woman who wants to be her own master, and make her own decisions, but all of these decisions are biting her and her family in the ass, and she can’t see beyond her own emotions until she has reaped the whirlwind.

OHHHH that is an end to the horse race that I was not expecting! What’s going to happen now? I mean I guess I should have expected this the moment that Vasya said she was going to leave RIGHT AFTER THE RACE. I assume that this is the means by which Kasyan discredits the siblings, leaving him free for his plans with Moscow.

collision course,-

The artificial frustration in this book is that Vasilisa’s youngest brother suffered with her in the previous book and has not even been mentioned apart from Olga’s secret message, and this is the one person who can corroborate everything that Vasilisa has said.

Vasya is enjoying being a hero but both her and her brother have questions that need answering. It helps the suspense that we haven’t really answered any of the questions posed by the tatars, but there is an implication that Kasyan is somehow linked to the tatars. An upstart? “We are not all born lords’ sons.”

There was very little romance in the first book, just undertones, but now Arden is delivering on the promise of a witch-girl and the Russian god of winter death falling for each other, but with a whole host of mysteries as to his own fairy tale past and leading into what is going on with what was teased in the first 50 or so pages with the tatars. Which has already intersected with Kasyan.

For a sequel it takes a long time (50 pages) to integrate Vasya back into the narrative, but given the context, it would be spoiling if we knew what exactly she had been up to while her brother is trying to figure out the horrid bandit problem. I didn’t know how much overlap the story would have but it’s no surprise to see the “blameless” Konstantin as the story connects with Olga, the older sister.

It is kind of hard to accept that Assef is the secret overarching bad guy, like we crammed all of the romance into the biggest reveal, but it still fits. this is a brutal book.

I have been reading too many romances because what I expected to be true turned out to be, but how we got there was a far more organic experience. It is also a glimpse now of Afghanistan between its pre-70s prosperity to the years of civil war and being frank about the horrors of the Taliban.