Jesse > Recent Status Updates

portions of this novel feel like they’re cribbing from Leigh Bardugo… like a Matthias / Nina retelling (if the Norseman had their own magic and if Nina was, like, a completely different person, lol), or the near-end of the story involving the hunt for a mythical bird.

I think that this novel could stand to have a little more breathing room. I am loving Evike’s discovering the not-Jewish faith (complete with literally retelling the story of Esther) but a bit of a slower pace, to let the fables air out a bit, might help them feel less cribbed in to the narrative.

I’m glad!!! I’m glad that she loves to talk so freakin much that she can’t stop herself from accidentally volunteering sensitive information to the villain!!! This. Makes. Sense!

Also her finding out that she has hereditary magic, just not from her mom’s side of her genes, is a very sweet moment considering how her reunion with her estranged father COULD have played out.

on the scale of being perpetually angry and delivering every line with maximum calculated venom to apologizing for your very existence with a supreme weariness, YA female protagonists waltz up and down. (it’s all a morass of responses to extreme chronic stress!!) Evike spends more time on the former side, having some of Mare’s apparent death wish, but her othering by her village cut deep scars.

Idk if it’s just the tropes at play but this feels vaguely like Bardugo, like a rewrite of Nina and Matthias, but with the annoying bit that everyone calls Evike “wolf-girl” which admittedly is 80% less obnoxious than “little lightning girl”.

The encounter at the village makes this feel more like a… typical? adventure novel. Evike and Gaspar help the village out with a problem and Evike (and us) find out a little bit more of the not-Christian religion of the mainstream. Right now we are in a ridiculous Only One Bed scenario where the bed is a hollow in the roots of an enormous tree 🙂‍↔️

50 pages in and we are pretty YA AF. Évike is the one pagan girl of her tribe who has no magic but is a great hunter and fighter. But she is Expendable, and thus given to the Woodsmen. Bárány Gáspár is no great Woodsman; he is a prince who can work… Judeo-Christian magic. She hates him!!! But I have a feeling that these enemies won’t be mad at each other forever!!!

after reading V. it is time for… filling out my Ava Reid backlog!!!

two things: I liked Juniper and Thorn but it was a bleak novel, characterized by the MC’s relentless abuse and the miasma of her trauma. I liked the Russian fantasy.

I am aware that people are drawing unfavorable comparisons to Reid and The Bear and the Nightingale. In this, I can’t offer an opinion… yet.

“…some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere: it is a kind of talent and objections to it are rare but even at that captious.”

Chapter Sixteen
Sahha

I don’t know where this is going but I am dreading Profane’s slow dissolution and the apparent termination of his relationship with Rachel.

This section has the dissolution of Profane’s relationship with Rachel as Pynchon slowly pushes him together with Stencil and Paola… and another deeply uncomfortable chapter, “V. In Love”, which dwells more on Pynchon’s decadence and in this a character study of a ballerina who was molested by her father and effectively disowned by her mother and trauma and psychosexual theory and

Never in a million years would I have guessed the plot twist with Paola.

The Malta narrative is the confession of Paola’s father, confusing for its insistence on referring to a handful of progressive personalities of Fausto as he looks back at epochs in his life. It is a tired, world-weary story of the siege of Malta and further develops Pynchon’s feelings on decadence and “inanimateness”.

The introduction of Pig seems to be a confounding factor for Profane’s journey but it is also by way of his amorous pursuit a sneaky way of reminding us that Paola is supposed to be in this social circle as characters constantly wonder where Paola is and what she is doing. We find out, leading into chapter 11, what she has been up to, and to no one’s surprise Stencil’s suspicions are somewhat founded.

oh god no

this starts out as a description of a German engineer in post-WW2 west Africa during a rebellion and goes into a dark, dark place as Foppl’s story of the genocide and enslavement of the West African people 18 years prior intrudes into Mondaugen’s careening through the debauched German house party, a sort of 120 Days of Sodom. I’m, I don’t even

The episode in Italy feels more fully-realized but still maddening in what Vheissu is or isn’t. It’s a great, multi-layered story and the bits of Mantessi relinquishing the beauty of the Venus and the dalliance between Evan and the enigmatic, intrigue-seeking Victoria, and Evan’s father’s passionate pleadings are great.

Vheissu is the same and yet another thing entirely, another romantic intrigue set in the past and involving the British Foreign Office (and Victoria) yet again. The description of Vheissu, the elder’s interpretation of it, reminds me of Profane’s more moody musings, like his country of Rachel, of alienation.

A thorough description of a nose job, including the traumatic story of the why of the plastic surgeon; hunting alligators in the sewers, where an insane priest had once tried to convert the rats to Roman Catholicism while simultaneously eating them (and falling in love with V.eronica!!); Stencil I believe is shot as if he is an alligator; and Much Much More.

This section elaborates more on Rachel’s social circle and then plunges into Stencil’s quest for V. For a moment I thought that he was literally an undercover spy in each of the segments of Chapter III; now I can see that he is imagining the event from the POV of “impressions” of people who may or may not have existed. The political intrigue of English spies in Egypt is a fascinating wrinkle to the overall.

I love this. I am reminded of all of the tangents of Catch-22 but this novel is more bewildering because the first part we have followed Profane in his meandering march into depression and now, in following Rachel, have just encountered Stencil and thus the first mention of the titular concept, V. There is A LOT to unpack, flavored by gross Naval excesses and New York Jewish culture.

I’m pretty sure Alan lives through this but IM NOT SURE

like I know vaguely how this story ends but I don’t know enough about the collateral damage to not be worried for Liz and the twins 🫣

Given where Stark is right now, we have 150 pages left. It’s gonna be a pretty harrowing 150 pages 😬

King writes a lot here about the special connection between twins because of William and Wendy but more importantly, probably, the fact that Stark is a manifestation of the twin that was subsumed while a fetus and which had started to grow when Thad was 10-11. Maybe we’ll get to the why. I’m still wondering if we’ll find out that Stark-Thad was responsible for Liz’s miscarriage.

Wish I could say a lot more. There is a lot of true crime sort of investigative evidence with the phone recording and the voice prints as we are caught in a sort of The Exorcist scenario where George Stark is considered an impossibility in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. I don’t remember Alan from previous novels — but I know that he features in Needful Things.

Given that Thad wrote violent crime stories as George Stark and his dark twin is essentially a violent, homicidal manic on a warpath of revenge, it seems that King is having his fun writing a crime story while making enough of it supernatural intrigue to fit within his wheelhouse. He made some overt references to Agatha Christie but placing those as crime stories seems like it’s missing the point.