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Who learns Supply and Demand at fourteen? Also, you know the book is Fantasy when a medieval girl is taught anything other than housekeeping.

Chapter seven: no idea. She talked to Britta. She visualized winning the contest.

“Asland” or Aslan, right?

Flashback!

A vision.

Page 56, Miri fli-flops from her zealot dedication for plot.

Right. Right. Pink clothes.

Authors have the same reflex as they did seventeen years ago — “…the feature gave her a merry, pretty look when…”

It must be like boys in adventure books: a mixture between truth and stereotype.

I’ve always wondered if this portrayal of middle school girls is truthful or a literary invention.

In literature, a coin flip is never a 50/50 chance.

No plot more random than a Priest divination. Author asks herself: ‘how can I bring excitement to an underdog provincial town?’ ‘How do all Orphan stories begin?’

Here we go: sad miner girl can’t go mining like the boys can. She’s starting to “notice” a boys arm. And suddenly a messenger from the King.

“…he always came, in moments of dead calm; when the wave rippled and the spotted leaves fell slowly over her foot in the autumn woods; when the leopard was still; the moon was on the waters, and nothing moved in between sky and sea.”

“A toad set in emeralds! Harry the Archduke! Blue-bottles on the ceiling! (here another self came in). But Nell, Kit, Sasha? (she was sunk in gloom: tears actually shaped themselves and she had long given over crying). Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.)”

“And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature–one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one.”

“…toy boat climb the ripple, she thought she saw Bonthrop’s ship climb up and up a glassy wall; up and up it went, and a white crest with a thousand deaths in it arched over it;”

Cute. — “…added the words ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo’, which summed it up precisely.”

I like that we never see anything: like Jaws, it’s the best part of terror.

Characters strangely talk past each other a lot in this book. What happened to that one chapter that Eleanor and Luke might be becoming involved?

Weird thing to joke. — “Perhaps I will just push you over the edge,’ Luke said.”

One, two, Freddy's coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door…

Well, Mrs. Montague is one way to highten the tension. Just go on and pour gas on that fire.

Cool, but…what does that actually mean? — “…the shuddering whiteness of the trees…”

Just to remember…it’s been, what? Two days?

Lol. A Goya painting. Of course, there’s a Goya painting.

Might Hugh Crain be an allusion to Ichabod Crane?

I’m not sure when the change happened. Maybe when Eleanor saw her name in chalk. — “…and she wanted, quite honestly, to slap his face.”

I think it’s the “held hands tight; the room was brutally cold and thickly dark”, “so hard that each of them could feel the other’s bones”, “low, steady sound”, “a mumbled word”, “falling sometimes “, and “without warning,” that preceded it. Or else that would be a very funny baby gurgle.

It’s funny: this book tells us how Eleanor is frightened of babbling and gurgling laughter. I had to remember what that actually means (instead of just excepting it as terrifying), and gurgling laughter is actually pretty cute.