#cvgr

Ride the Storm is the perfect title for the 8th book of the Cassandra Palmer Series. Cassie is in the middle of several literal and figurative storms all throughout the book.  The pace of the beginning and ending of the book is rather frantic, but just like the eye of the storm, the middle is relatively calm.

Some fans have been disappointed in the lack of Pritkin in the past few books. But his absence has really caused Cassie to grow; to come into her own. To accept her power and move beyond her self-imposed limitations. And she does, big time. Karen Chance has said that Cassie is on the hero’s journey.  In the hero’s journey, the hero’s mentor usually must die for the hero to finally reach her full potential.  Well, Ms Chance likes to take her own spin on things.  Cassie’s mentor hasn’t died in the traditional sense, but he is very firmly out of commission.  Looked at this way, it’s easier to deal with Pritkin’s absence.  Remember, these books are about Cassie first and foremost.

Ride the Storm is the culmination of a lot of loose plot points and story lines that have been dangling for a while, since book one, in some cases.  At first, I thought that it tied everything up, but upon further reflection there are still some old unanswered questions and a few new ones posed. That makes my heart happy.  I am not ready to say goodbye to these characters or this universe yet.  There have been so many carefully laid pieces, hints, and such that finally see pay here.  A careful reader of the series might have caught a few of them and speculated and guessed at a few more.  No one could have figured out everything.  Karen Chance is too tricky for that.  There are no unnecessary characters or information contained in her books. Everything is significant, eventually.  Even pieces that we are convinced are plot holes, aren’t.  They are carefully laid pieces of a game, set to be played all in their due time.

The ending was very satisfying and wrapped up everything nicely.  It gave some hints for future character interactions, plot points, and areas of conflict, while still completely wrapping up the ongoing story arc.

The only real complaint I have is that I would have liked to get a better look inside Cassie’s mind during the last chapters and conclusion.  It left me with some unanswered questions as to her future. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, it’s good story telling and leaves me wanting more.  I’m just impatient.

cassieverse reread (10/?): Louis-Cesare

Guess who should be in bed and fast asleep right now and decided instead that sleep is for the weak? If you guessed me, you are 100% correct. But I’m making some great headway into EtN, so I’m making it work for me.

Chapter 1

This is tied for my favorite opening chapter. The banter alone is gold, but then we get things like sassy ghosts and Cassie holding two conversations at once, one with ghosts that Pritkin can’t follow, and it’s just comedic gold. I LOVE this, and it’s only tied by my love of the cliff scene from Hunt the Moon.

We didn’t have any in the last book, but this chapter has both a moon and a rain reference.

It’s a small thing, but I like how Cassie has this awesome power, but it comes with limits. It would be a less interesting story if Cassie was taking to everything too easily. And her limits get explained nicely here.

Chapter 2

We’re continuing comedic gold here too. Don’t get me wrong, the imagery of mages crushed by rock against Pritkin’s shields is disgusting, but then we get things like “If I tell you I’m alright, will you stop trying to help me?” and Cassie being perturbed by polite Pritkin and… yeah, one of my favorite openings.

And here’s the “you leave me behind” talk. Right, Pritkin, have you met Cassie? Like that’s ever going to happen.

Chapter 3

I’m laughing at the idea of Pritkin contacting all of these “experts” and paying them off so they’ll say the Codex doesn’t exist. But as much as he does not want the book found, I don’t think he’d go that far to keep the book out of Cassie’s hands.

This book’s Tarot reveal: The Magician Reversed. A salesman or conman who can make you believe almost anything, and he will not seem like a deceiver.

And now Cassie thinks it might refer to Pritkin, in part because she doesn’t know him as well as she’d like for as much as she depends on him. But mostly because of Rafe’s words calling his motives into question. I’d gotten used to the main antagonism being between Pritkin and Mircea and Cassie’s other bodyguards beginning to trust Pritkin. I forgot how deep the division between vamps and mages could be.

Chapter 4

I was confused with the constant references to the vamps already being at war. In more recent books, the war mostly focuses on the gods, but we haven’t really reached that point yet. But, thanks to some quick searching, I remembered that the vamps are at war with the Dark Circle right now. Gotta keep that in mind.

And here we are. The infamous marriage scene, where one is crazy out of his mind and the other is trusting because “Mircea never bit me.” Until he does. And I can’t blame him, because again, crazy out of his mind. He thinks she’s a dream, ergo the near draining her part. But at some point, you’ve gotta think he would’ve wanted more consent than this. Like, his own, if not Cassie’s.

Reading this scene again, it’s so obvious that yes, there is something going on of which Cassie is not aware regarding Mircea pushing her away. I think, even during my first readthrough, I was put off by the marriage scene. I was okay with Mircea back then, even if I was flying my Casskin flag proudly by the end of the second book/beginning of the third. But I could not wait to finish with this chapter and didn’t pay attention to the details as much as I should’ve.

Chapter 5

What a fantastic intro for Augustine. I hadn’t remembered that he was considered a new fashion designer. He just naturally fits as a veteran in my head.

More Francoise magic! I’m really curious what her role in the future will be. I’m sticking by my assertion that too much time was spent on her in the first book for her not to play a major role in the future, beyond Cassie’s friend.

Ch. 11

Poor Marlowe “It’s always the head” he sighed as he passed out.

And in the forest is the only real instance of rape-y scenes, throughout the series I believe. I know things get hinted at sometimes, but never gets to this level. *shudder*

Mac. I will never not tear up.

This time in the cell is like the only instance Tomas is likeable. Ish.

Ch. 12

Tomas is so sappy here. Get some class, dude.

Cassie accepts her role of Pythia, but still doesn’t understand everything that entails. Now at least she’s in “cage she had control of”

I wonder where Tomas heard the line “One to live, one to serve”

Something I love about KC, and find realistic, is that instead of one pile after another, sometimes everything happens all at once and noone has the chance to process it until way later, and in stages. Pritkin yelling at her, promising the codex, becoming Pythia, Francoise, etc

Ch. 13

How Marlowe treats Cassie did not prepare me for the Dory books and his treatment there

Poor Billy. They bitch about each other, but when they are stressed, the other just completely does whatever they can.

“Vermillion Pantaloons” that image of Marlowe’s pants cracks me up. 

More hints at Pritkin’s incubus side. Casanova “can’t harm him physically” and “I may serve two masters but I try to do it well”

Poor Billy, having to die all over again

And finally Cassie and Pritkin clear up misunderstanding #572. Only 4503 left to go!

And Pritkin deciding to give her chance, finally.

Ch. 14

I would pay money to hear Pritkin’s “whooping”, aka the last bit of his boyhood he has left now

I love how many figures from history Karen Chance pulls into her stories, and in numerous ways

I actually really like that KC doesn’t focus on Dracula too much--she focuses on his impact on other characters, but she doesn’t bother building him up the way she does her other villians, her other characters, and so on. 

I have such a beautiful mental image of Billy-As-Cassie throwing the tattoo wards of Mac’s into the air to save everyone. I can see it in my head and it’s moving

I love how in just a sentence KC again reestablishes her character’s motiviations: 

Everyone froze for half a second. Then the Senators melted away, flowing out of the theatre as quickly as they'd come into it, Mircea grabbed Billy and jumped straight up to the rafters, and Dracula ran towards us after snatching up Stoker. Pritkin threw an arm around my waist and took a flying leap off the stage. We landed in the orchestra pit, and because he'd rolled us at the last minute, he took the brunt of the impact.

Ch. 15

Cassie tearing up and admitting victory came at such a price because the tattoo wards were gone is just another way of showing her compassion and empathy. =( 

For reference: Small green lizard remains for now

I wanna know more about the Agnes and Billy roommate situation

Pritkin just obeys Agnes without question. I really wanna know how close they were.

“Watching the fight grimly” Pritkin knew Agness would die tonight again.

This whole exchange makes me cry, no lie. Pritkin, as much as he barely knows cassie, would spare her this ugliness if he could, but at the same time he knows he can’t. He doesn’t talk down to her the entire scene. Agnes is both somewhat scornful but also very compassionate. And then Cassie, horrified and terrified and guilty. It’s so harsh because it’s so real.

Seriously though, how close is Pritkin to Agnes?

I whirled on Pritkin, who was still on his knees, watching the blood spill across the boards in a widening stain. For a second, he looked lost, like a bewildered child. Then the expression was gone so quickly I wasn't sure it had been there at all.

@gimicky-supreme wrote: since book one she knew she couldn’t trust Mircea, his meddling and the Geis and the lust just get to her. I hope she remembers this soon. I Think if it weren’t for the geis she would not have gone this far with him.

I agree that the story wouldn't have progressed this way, but I think that would have been due to a lack time, not a lack of interest (on Cassie's part at least, as we can’t see into Mircea’s thoughts). The 'plot’ apparently needed the geis as a catalyst to drive Cassie and Mircea to a level of intimacy they wouldn't have realistically achieved in such a limited time frame. This is the same as the incubus emergency feedings, which acted as the catalyst to drive Cassie and Pritkin to a level of intimacy they wouldn't have realistically achieved on their own. In both cases, there is a plot device to compel characters to overcome distance, boundaries and walls that otherwise would have taken a long time to break down, time that the books' pacing does not have. And to be fair, It's KC's choice to write the books in such a way that makes this 'necessary for the plot', I'm just personally not too fond of this recurring theme.

While Cassie initially thinks that the geis is an emotional manipulation spell that makes her lust after Mircea, that turns out to be wrong by the time of EtN. Casanova explains that what she feels is real, only magnified, so the geis is only reacting to Cassie's already existing feelings of love/lust for Mircea. Plus, Mircea admits in TtD that he never really looked at Cassie with arousal until she expressed her desire for him. Pritkin too confirms that the geis doubled because it is controlled by the more powerful party, and with the Pythian power, it reacted to Cassie's unconscious need for intimacy with Mircea.

I'd like to add to this by also bringing up the Pythian power itself, which during TtD and CbS was firing up lust to complete itself through sex too. So this long list of emergency sex, haywire spell, self-completing power, and later emergency incubus feedings just illustrate that this trend probably deserves its own post. But while the sex in the books may be driven by the need of the plot early on that overshadows Cassie's existing volition, this becomes much clearer later in the books after the immediate compelling devices are removed from the equation.

Even before the geis flared up, Cassie admits she's had a huge crush on Mircea, she finds him hot and obviously desires him. That would have been there without the geis and the Pythian rites too. When the geis is removed, she has a mark, and they have had sex, but there's no regret on her part. When Mircea crazed out his mind stopped to ask her if she was really sure, she already reaffirmed her choice on the sex, and when she's explicitly asked if she'd rather she wasn't marked, or if she wants to 'break up' she says no to both, and wants to date instead. Their conflicts about the mark weren't about their intimacy, the sex, or the mark's existence, but about what it meant, as Mircea was trying to play the 'marriage' interpretation to Cassie and the 'servant' interpretation to the Senate. Cassie also reaffirms several times internally that she loves Mircea, she indulges in her desire for him, and she has sex with him, including playfulness and her taking initiative (see RtW for instance).

The similar plot device set-up applies to incubus-induced lust too. Cassie first gets the hots for Rosier and Pritkin while the Pythian power is already leaking into her and is trying to complete itself via sex (Tomas joins this category too). Then there's the emergency incubus feeding, which involves powers literally bred to be arousing. There's more of that, always under the threat of death, with very little acknowledgment of any love or lust that existed before it, or persists outside of it (this too is worthy of giant posts, about denial and such). But even if they were under some magical plot device, the attraction could have been there without it too. We will see how/if/when that love/lust will be addressed outside of compelling circumstances and outside magical influences, exactly how the sincerity of Cassie's volition became clear after, not while under the effect of the geis.

Nothing re-read related, just a thought I had when I was supposed to be asleep last night. I think we’ve established, and KC says so too, that Cassie is a pretty unorthodox heroine in that she doesn’t start her journey as a professional badass with combat skills and perfect knowledge about her world and this calm, heroic attitude that doesn’t do screaming and crying and getting upset about broken nails because what a mundane thing to do. She sort of gets there and certainly grows with the obstacles she faces, but she’s still not the typical amazon you usually see when female protagonists fight their own battles. Dory on the other hand fits that trope a lot better, but if you leave aside the battle skills, she’s pretty unusual, too.

Normally when there’s a story about a fight between good and evil, with the whole world (in our case, worlds) at stake, the protagonists have something that sets them apart from everyone else, something that makes them the only people capable of turning things around and let the good side win against all odds after all. This key figure-trope, whether the character in question is female or male, represents itself either as the Chosen One by default, with something like a prophecy, a family relation or a superpower distinguishing them from everyone else; or they get into that key position by stumbling into it more or less unintentionally and then get elevated by the people around them. Cassie kinda fits both descriptions a bit: she has the family relation, therefore becomes eligible for the superpower, and things just happen after that (until she starts owning it, of course). And while Dory, through Mircea, has the family connection, too, it doesn’t really get her anywhere, besides not being murdered at a young age. It certainly doesn’t positively set her apart from everyone else and make her eligible for the position of the heroine.

From a purely human perspective, she obviously has some physical advantages like heightened senses and strength, but those only go so far as to level the playing field. They’re certainly nothing special in the supernatural world and don’t get her anywhere all by themselves, they just make sure that she has a fighting chance against other super-natural creatures. Plus she also doesn’t really have any resources from social connections to draw from since she mostly rejects her family and is rejected by everyone else herself. Everything she has, every capability, she’s worked for and earned with years of practice, which in turn makes it attainable for everyone (theoretically, if one has similar physical advantages). There’s no immanent reason for her to be the one who saves the day built into the story. From a narrative perspective, someone like Claire would be a much more obvious choice, with her marrying into the Fae court and being able to transform into a dragon and all that. That makes Dory an unusual hero/heroine just like Cassie, only in different ways.

This is getting longer than I expected, but I wanna elaborate a bit on the hero thing, so be warned that this could get a bit off topic. I’m a university student, and I’m an assistant to a professor who’s working on a project about heroes and the discourses that make them heroes. Of course that’s all very academic and in my opinion (don’t tell him that) only partially applicable to real life (I’m including fiction into that, by the way). But because of my work I’ve picked up a few theoretical aspects of what makes a hero which I think would be nice to test here, so I’m gonna use what is probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience and use what I learned there outside university. But as I’m not in university, I’ll take the liberty to stop gendering the word hero and simply use heroine for both genders, because why not.

So theory says that a heroine’s function is to connect the sacred and the mundane sphere. That sounds pretty abstract, but makes sense when you think about the ancient Greeks. Most heroic figures in Greek mythology are demigods, which makes them the connection between the sacred (the gods) and the mundane (humankind) in corporeal form. So according to theory, in order to be a heroine you need to incorporate both mundane and sacred aspects, not necessarily in your genes but in your skill set, your value system, your charisma, somewhere. And then you need to do something with what you’ve got in order for the sacred inside you to show, which in turn kicks off the discourse that makes sure you’re elevated to a superhuman position, and remembered after you died. This means that the heroine doesn’t need innate heroic features of some sort - she can also develop them on her journey - but she needs them to be noticed by someone and recognized as something special, which makes her more than human and therefore partly sacred. She can then serve as a role model for other people, but for her to be a heroine, she can’t have something that everybody else can achieve, too, with the right motivation and some time, because if her heroic quality was accessible to everyone, it would no longer be part of the sacred sphere. It would be mundane, and kinda boring, and in time this quality and with it the heroine would be forgotten.

See what I’m getting at? If you take this (very simplified and probably partly inaccurate) analysis as a foundation, Cassie is a much more typical heroine than Dory. Cassie has a skill that sets her apart from the vast majority of people in her world, and she’s the only one in her time who can wield her superpower to the extent she can. Yes, there’s the acolytes, but you’re not remembered for being the second best (and therefore not a heroine, because being remembered and recognized as such is a vital part of heroism), and yes, she had to work for it, but she had to hone her skills, not attain them in the first place. Other people who don’t have this sort of skill or parentage don’t even get the chance to try if they’re good at it. Which, coincidentally, are both of divine origin, which would make a researcher on heroism sob with joy because it fits the theory so well. Cassie is both literally and figuratively a link between the sacred and the mundane, and therefore in that respect a classic heroine.

You’ll notice that I’m not basing this on fighting skills but solely on extraordinary powers because they’re basically accessible to everybody. Pritkin for example can’t be considered a hero because he’s good at various combat techniques, but rather because of his extraordinary talent for magic, and maybe also because he tried on numerous occasions to sacrifice himself for Cassie, and one time succeeded, which is important. I’m saying maybe because an act of martyrdom as a qualification for heroism is controversial among researchers. Some say it requires extraordinary strength to do it and therefore partly sacralizes the heroine, while others contend that everybody can die, and depending on your mindset and circumstances it might not even be a hard decision to make, which makes it purely mundane and the martyr therefore not a heroine. My personal, unqualified opinion is that while it certainly requires admirable strength, especially in times of war dying for another person or being prepared to do so is not uncommon enough to qualify as heroic in the sense of sacred, so I’ll exclude acts of martyrdom as a qualification for being a typical heroine.

I remember the second time I ever re-read this, thinking to myself ‘Oh Pritkin honey, you really didn't try too hard when you were coming up with a new first name did you? Lol.’ And this time around I just got this like, mental image coupled with a drabble bunny that wouldn’t go away. Like he comes up with this fancy ass last name and then he just tacks on... ‘John’. It always made me a bit suspicious. So here’s some kind of approximation of how I thought it went....