Shannon > Recent Status Updates

Cal's smile faded. She wrinkled her nose. "I didn't see your veil. You're a Seal. They don't like Seals in Ixion, it takes them too long to loosen up. Some of them go frossing mad before they do."
Retra stiffened. Cal's swearing shocked her. "How do you know that?"
Cal inched away as if she might catch something. "Stands to reason, doesn't it? You super-straights are a bit retarded ..."

...

Huh?

The girl put out her small, pale hand. "I'm Liesl," she said.
Will's heart gave another jump. Liesl. All this time he had desperately wanted to know her name, and there it was, and as soon as he knew it, he saw it fitted her exactly. "I'm William," he said. "But you can call me Will."
He took her hand, and they smiled at each other across the dark, as the cart carrying coffins and four stowaways rattled west.

"But they must have been one or the other at some time. When they were, um, on this side?"
"Oh, yes, I suppose so." The girl seemed unconcerned. "But they can hardly be expected to remember. They've been on the Other Side for a very long time. So now they are just Bundle and Po, and my friends." She leaned closer. "They helped me run away from the attic. That's where I'd been living."

Liesl had at that moment paused outside to get her bearings, and as she turned and looked around her, both Will and the old woman, staring down, got a nice long look at her face. Will thought, Angel, precisely as the old woman thought, Devil, and let out a wicked howl.
(That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.)

Read-along with Lucy!

"When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air, do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different."
"True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then."

This is the type of book where multiple characters have different stories going on all at the same time that don't really seem to have anything in common, and then they all end up meeting at some point and making sense. I like those types of books.

Liesl sat very still. For a moment she was so still and white Po was actually frightened, though he had never once been frightened of a living one before. They were too fragile, too easily broken and dismantled: They had bones that broke and skin that tore and hearts that gave up with a sigh and rolled over.

"I may be dead, but home is wherever I built my life, and it is where I will go back in my death. Home is where my only child was born, and home is where my first wife, my love, was laid in the ground. She is not here, because she is home, and home is the pond with the willow tree standing next to it, and dead, alive, or in-between, I am going home. Do you understand me?"

For the eighty millionth time, the alchemist wished that when he had gone to the orphanage to select an apprentice, he had selected someone—anyone!—else. Even the girl who was missing both arms would have been preferable.

Ouch!

The alchemist's boots rang out sharply on the pavement, so that more than one child—sleeping in the darkened rooms above the street—had their dreams punctuated by the sound of ice picks, or knives clashing with other knives, or hammers coming down on glass.

I think I love this book already.

Two visits to the Living Side, and the ghost had already become a little more human.
Po had remembered how to lie.

Liesl had long ago lost count, but the sun had not come out in 1,728 days. One day the clouds had come, as they often had before. Nobody was especially concerned. The clouds would surely break up tomorrow, or the next day, or certainly the day after that.
But they had not broken up for 1,728 days in a row. Sometimes it rained. In the winter there was hail and slush. But it was never sunny.

Reminds me of Michigan

Po was sad, because the ghost knew that in the vast oceans of time that surrounded it endlessly on either side, somehow there was never enough time for the very things you needed to say and do. But it would not tell Liesl that.

"I'm very sorry to hear you are tired," she said stiffly, her inside voice screaming: Tell me what you know about my dad! Tell me now or I'll kill you again! I'll make you a double-ghost!

Coincidences; mix-ups; harmless mistakes and switches. And so a story is born.

He went to the door of his atelier and looked through the grimy window to the narrow street. He saw nothing but a patch of black hair sprouting at the very bottom of the window. The alchemist's boy: Billy or Michael or something-or-other, Mr. Gray could never remember. All children were the same to him: strange and sticky and best avoided, like an upright variety of jellyfish.

She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.
And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.

Wendy, I've started! And I think I might just read this book in one sitting ...

Before any of this had happened—she was just a mechanic, and he was the prince with all the charms she pretended to be immune to. And he was there, before her, while she tottered on a single foot and tried to calm her rapidly beating heart. How she could barely meet his gaze. How he leaned forward, forced her to see him, smiled.
There.
That moment. That smile.
Again and again and again.

:'(

Her fingertips tentatively curled around the hair at the back of his neck, and she found that she was shaking, sure he would push her away at any moment. But he didn't. He did not pull away. Did not grimace.
His lips parted, just barely, and Cinder wondered if maybe she wasn't the only one having trouble breathing.

It was not her fault he had liked her.
It was not her fault she was cyborg.
She would not apologize.

Hell yeah, Cinder.

"Here, I brought you something."
Cinder dropped the screwdriver with a clatter. "What's that for?"
A flash of hurt crossed his face. "What? I can't buy you a gift?" he asked, in a tone that nearly stopped the electric pulses in her wiring.
"No. Not after I've ignored six of your comms in the last week. Are you dense?"

Heh. I love banter like this and the believable relationship that's formed.

Cinder really needs a fairy godmother now. : (

Kai was still standing in elevator B, one hand propping open the door.
Her nerves were frazzled, and all the emotions of the past hour were converging into a single, sickening feeling—exasperation. The hall was filled with doctors, nurses, androids, officials, technicians, and they all fell into an awkward hush and stared at the prince and the girl in the baggy cargo pants he was flirting with.
Flirting.

"I think you should go to the ball with me."
"Stars," she muttered. "Didn't you already ask me that?"
"I'm hoping for a more favorable answer this time. And I seem to be getting more desperate by the minute."
"How charming."
Kai's lip twitched. "Please?"
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"I mean, why me?"
"So if my escape hover breaks down, I'll have someone on hand to fix it?"

Ha. Cute.

"Maybe her programming was overwhelmed by Prince Kai's uncanny hotness."
Cinder flinched. "Can we please not talk about the prince?"
"I don't think that will be possible. You're working on his android, after all. Just think about the things she knows, the things she's seen and—" Iko's voice sputtered. "Do you think she's seen him in the nude?"
"You're not helping."
"I'm just making conversation."

Oh man, the Lunar queen is going to be trouble. And she needs to stay the hell away from the Prince. :<

"E-excuse me?"
Kai cleared his throat. Stood straighter. "I assume you are going to the ball?"
"I-I don't know. I mean, no. No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to the ball."
Kai drew back, confused. "Oh. Well ... but ... maybe you would change your mind? Because I am, you know."
"The prince."
"Not bragging," he said quickly. "Just a fact."

!!! Lol. Too funny.