Emineminem

But still.

Sometimes when he feels like poking the wound, Jack opens up the diary. The last gift he ever received from Mum. Sometimes he tries to put his hands on exactly the same spots her hands held when she presented it to him. Sometimes he tries to relate to the excitable kid who wrote those entries. It feels impossible. The little twerp was just so… naïve.

The last entry is the worst one.

We need to normalize deep psychological analyses of traumatized magic preteens and all of the other characters around them. We need to normalize talking about how realistically done Mog’s trauma and Hawthornes neuroatypicality and Jack’s and Cadence’s loneliness and Thadea’s struggles with loyalty and familial values and Lam’s and Annah’s anxieties all are. We need to normalize talking about how every character affects every other character in real ways that actually matter. And how characters like Mildmay and Onstald are written so that we aren’t supposed to know how to feel about either of them bc they’re people and people are incredibly complicated.

and i'm obsessed with the evolution of morrigan's view of ezra

in general i love how this series and especially this book presents characters as complicated and messy and real and how the narrative itself loves them for it

morrigan finds out her mother was a traitor and that makes her more real than being a perfect angel

morrigan herself is making, frankly, terrible choices through this whole book but they are so understandable and exactly the choices a teenager would make in those circumstances and they're in character and believable and the story flourishes around that rather than it feeling frustrating

and ezra! who started off as kind mr jones who gave her hope, became the nightmare she was trying to escape, is still the shadow she won't ever free herself from, loves nevermoor exactly like she does, used to be the little boy in her ghostly hours, and is the best teacher she's ever had

ezra isn't a character we love who has complicated traits nor is the narrative trying to redeem him

he's a murderer and a monster and an unflinching one at that, discusses and creates genocide for a quick buck and he killed every last one of his friends

he also gives morrigan nothing but informed decisions (as opposed to jupiter who tries to protect her, which is a whole other post, but in short i think jupiter is also very understandable at least in the first few books because morrigan was raised knowing exactly what was going to happen to her and maybe she doesn't need information that will only worry her and he can give her a bit of a childhood but also she's growing up and he needs to understand that)

he has a conscience, he feels guilt in the hollowpox hospital wing, he loves nevermoor in its' wildness and freedom and would rather never return than allow it to be destroyed