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It’s comforting and reassuring to know that this book would not have been enough to sustain a full session of our beloved Twilight Book Club.

This is going to be one of the best books I read this year.

I always spend the first 30 or so pages of Conroy unsure if I’m going to like it. Then something flips and I’m thoroughly invested once again.

“Cosette, the time has come to tell you the name of your mother. Her name was Fantine. Remember that name…She suffered a great deal. And loved you very much.

“So I am going away, my children. Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.”

“This convict, this desperate man, I have pursued to the point of persecution, and he has had me beneath his feet, and could have avenged himself, and ought to have done so…in granting me my life, in sparing me, what has he done? His duty? No. Something more. And I, in sparing him in turn, what have I done. My duty? No. Something more.”

Victor Hugo giving a shout out to John Brown as a heroic martyr for progress was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

“Citizens, in the future there shall be neither darkness nor thunderbols, neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood…In the future no man will slay his fellow, the earth will be radiant, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, that day when all shall be concord, harmony, light, joy, and life; it will come, and it is so that it may come that we are going to die.”

“Night fell. Paris seemed more and more ominously lit by the stupendous flame of the uprising.”

“By the way, you know you’ve promised me something?”

Marius fumbled in his pocket. He had nothing in the world but the five francs…he took it and put it in Eponine’s hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, then, looking at him glumly, “I don’t want your money,” she said.

“During that seemingly indifferent time, a vague revolutionary thrill was noticeable…a mere hint of mystery threatened the established order of things—a sign revolutionary in the highest degree.”

“They declared themselves the Friends of the ABC [pronounced ah-bay-say]. The abaissé [the abased] were the people. They wished to raise them up. One pun that is not funny. Puns can be serious in politics.”

🎵Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war.
Waterloo, promise to love you forevermore.🎶

“Javert personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial function as destroyers of evil. He was surrounded and supported by infinite depths of authority, reason, precedent, legal conscience, the vengeance of the law, all the stars in the firmament…Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what might be called all the evil of good.”

“So he had to go to Arras, save the false Jean Valjean, turn in the true one. Alas! That was the greatest sacrifice, the most poignant victory, the final step to be taken, but he had to do it. Painful fate! He could only enter into holiness in God’s eyes, by returning to the infamy of men’s.”

This is kind of like in a solo Marvel movie where there’s an Avengers Assemble level threat but because it’s a solo movie only one Avenger shows up.

“Do not forget, ever, that you have promised to use this silver to become an honest man….Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul I’m buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

Can’t lie. This is rough.

MFA propaganda against quotation marks is so pervasive.

Quite cynical in comparison to The Twilight Saga, itself an outwardly optimistic but quietly cynical narrative itself.

Meyer loves having her characters visit rich people’s homes and fetishizing the details of wealth.

Are you a big tough guy in a Stephenie Meyer book? Then you call every woman you know by a cringe nickname.

Best read of the summer?

Hoping we don’t spend too much more time in the safe house.

The romance has officially begun. Charming enough despite the fact that she brutally tortured him for information he didn’t have.

I’ve read enough Meyer novels that her frequent use of the word “obviously” is irritating me. She uses it as a very lazy telling not showing word.

Deeply (and fairly) cynical take on the US government here.

Notably better pacing in comparison to Meyer’s previous work (so far, anyway). It’s attention-getting, but it’s taken a turn to the distasteful. She’s a professional interrogator. She abducts a hot English teacher suspected of terrorist collaboration. She tortures him…but at some point they’re clearly going to fall in love. Not into the romantic dynamics or (thus far) pro-torture messaging.

Masterpiece. Whenever I think I’ve got this story figured out Brown pulls off another great twist.