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Finished - Wedding Preparations in the Country

A meandering travelogue about a neurotic, socially anxious man who is going to see his fiancée. I should specify that not all of the stories found in this collection are actually “finished”. This one has several sections marked “(x) pages missing” and ends abruptly in the middle of its narrative with no resolution, which is literarily poetic.

Finished: Description of a Struggle

Kafka communicates more than anything else the unease of existing through multiple neuroses. This story is incredibly confusing as its middle section is an enormous, dream-like flight of fantasy. I assume that it’s allegorical. It is bookended by two men who are keeping each other company and dislike each other but are brought together by their existential ennui.

This is really cute. I’m down for stories involving blended families, especially when part of the subterfuge is a female assassin and a telepathic little girl who will likely be the key to bringing her pseudo-adoptive parents together into a true family unit.

I think that the part of Nita’s pov that rankles is my mind is how she is a sociopathic voice. It’s deeply uncomfortable but a fantastic experiment. I know sociopathic voices exist in literature - but Nita’s will be unique due to the fantastic events surrounding her creation, how she was groomed to be a sociopath by her mother and then forged in the fire of the death market.

A few fun twists. It’s nice to see a moment where Nita is finally overextended - she is such portrayed as such a mastermind of human chess that the humility from realizing how Adair has her outclassed comes as a breath of fresh air. Still waiting to see whether Gold ties back into the story.

some deeper truths about the major players, ending with the Alberto bombshell. I really dislike Nita’s narrative voice. She is absolutely cocksure in her worldview and comes across as narcissistic. Like - I don’t hate the writing, I just dislike her as a person which, hello, self-serving serial killer with zero empathy!!! I get that she is a product of her mother and the market. She just slid right into her role.

Nita’s insistence on the ugliness of the universe is exhausting but essential as it is one of the few things that she uses to justify her vile behavior. I don’t know if I buy her meteoric rise from auto-pilot dissection shut-in to the lesser of evils, master cell-phone tactician. At this point she is like an infant Kaz, minus the Whedonesque impromptu support network.

In a way this feels like a dark inversion of the Divergent series. I would not be surprised if Nita dies saving Kovit from INHUP. That or she fakes her own death…

I was pleasantly surprised to find this “romance” having an asexual turn. I dunno if it makes more sense psychologically speaking, but it feels like it does, and I wager that it’s underrepresented in YA.

Okay! We are finally bringing some of the bigger catalysts together as we close out plot threads. I’m excited to see how things pan out with Nita’s mom. I almost suspect that she killed Nita’s father.

Mostly interpersonal drama so far, furthering the ambiguity of Fabricio’s situation and trying to muddy the waters between Nita and Kovit, with Fabricio focused on Nita - who he has the most history with - and Gold appealing to Nita with her history with Kovit. I’m sure that YA sowing doubt in relationship statuses in series is a staple

Well uh that’s one big ol’ cliff-hanger. I think that the romance between two maladjusted sociopaths is klunky but, really, how can it be anything but? That is more of an argument as to whether or not their romance should even exist and I’m not gonna bag on it because I think another core concept of this book is exploring intimate relationships between sociopaths. Problematic though they may be

FINALLY. The crux of this relationship is a toxic pairing born from trauma bonding. It’s really squicky but I understand how Nita and Kovit got to where they are. They’re two horrifically abused kids, one genetically predisposed toward serial killing. One wonders what a “normal” coping Zannie would be like - is Zannieism more relatable to drug addicts who chase worse and worse highs?

An unenviable position for Nita where she guesses at the trauma-bonding that brought her to imprint on a torturing serial killer. Her moment with her mom is bittersweet but also shrouded in the language of an abuser who is offering excuses for their horrific behavior. In this case, it feels like we are leaning toward cyclical generational trauma. Like, what if her mom already lost a child to the black market?

At this point much of the book’s emphasis is on how hamstrung Nita has been by her sheltered, utilitarian existence. She continues to be naive about both good and bad things and justifies her attitude with her victory over the Death Market. She had an action hero moment, more or less, and believes in the sanctity of her agency. She is a main character with Main Character syndrome.

I am kind of interested in Nita’s vengeance story but the unnatural community / society feels more interesting, here. Adair and Diana are interesting characters and I’m all for seeing how unnaturals who have gone underground try to maintain a semblance of the normal lives that they were raised in. It feels like Gold could be a cool character - the pawn shop suggests a lot more depth to her and her situation.

More reading about Kovit’s long hair and him brushing it out of his eyes and Anita instinctively wanting to brush it out of his eyes. Schaeffer is going hard on drawing more parallels between the MCs as she explores Kovit’s backstory; part of that is how this is more purposefully romantic than Not Even Bones. It also has Nita exploring the relative morality that she wants to disclaim.

Schaeffer’s Nita does a lot of wallowing in whether or not she is a monster for doing things that basically are meant to ensure her own survival against the Market. The philosophical concept is basically a utopian paradox - because she holds herself to more or less absolute virtue, she considers whether or not she is a monster.

Also surprised to see the anti-capitalist / western theme is absent for the moment.

Getting a better feel for Anita’s relationship with her father since this novel focuses on her grief with his loss. Her constant yearning to dissect people as a coping mechanism is super extra but there is a lot of merit in how the book is exploring the mindsets of consciously socially awkward people. It’s interesting to see how physical contact is a focal point for character traits across YA.

Upping the stakes early on with attempted murder. It remains to be seen just how much of the truth Fabricio has been telling… possible plot twist is she finally kills him and THEN finds out he was being mostly truthful, which would be textbook blurred lines YA and usher Nita further down her dark road. Or, it turns out he really is just an awful person doing what he can to survive, transmuting her in the process.

The basic idea of Fantastica as Bastian interacts with it is enthralling. It’s a shared fiction that has a memory of sorts of all the children who have visited it as each one adds new kingdoms and histories.

Somewhere in this is story is a parable relatable to falling in love with a story and then writing yourself into it as a deeply unappealing self-insert… it’s more broadly relatable as losing one’s self in the act of imagination. As a metaphorical / metaphysical work, that’s pretty heady stuff for a kid’s book as it takes the time to show Bastian’s development.

Bastian’s love and sympathy for the Many Colored Death is so simply beautiful in a way that’s much easier to get away with in children’s books

The book exists in roughly two halves and the first - the time before Bastian arrives in Fantastica - is finished. The way his story weaves with the “book”‘s narrative is very clever and I loved the bit where the Childlike Empress had a showdown with the Old Man of Wandering Mountain.

I don’t know if I ever saw The Neverending Story in full. I know that I have seen scenes but I have no idea how close any of this is to the movie. But I realize now that some of my ideas about how a few of these characters look are wholly derived from how they were rendered in the movie, which is somewhat disappointing considering they are the few differences that I can actually pick out.