#origin1

I can't give it a full 5 because not everyone is going to have that experience when they read this. It's just going to look very strange and floaty and things won't make very much sense. This book hits close to home with me because it heavily echoes (more like yells about) my first long distance relationship. I'm not really able to see this book through any other lens, so that's what my commentary is mostly about.

So for the part that ISN'T about that stuff though: The art is amazing. Even though it's made by one person technically, both fictional artists have their own, distinct style. Let's be real: The art and the interactivity is the main draw of this book. There are envelopes inside with letters carrying a myriad of little details: Griffin uses a typewriter for his long-form letters, and bits where he's crossed out typos or added in letters with pen, or that Sabine's correspondence is something I now recognize as someone who uses quills or manual dip pens. The inconsistency in the color of her writings suggests she's using a homemade ink, brownish in color, slightly too watery. Maybe it's even watered down watercolor and not even ink at all. They've also made the background of her letters and cards a rich dark gray, while Griffin's is a clean, sterile white.

"Will you explain to me about those geometric paintings you did at Art college? I want to understand their hidden language of color and shape. It's so alien to me."

So this is about the fourth time I'm reading this book since I first got it, and now that I have to write about it, I'm noticing so many more details. Here the line "It's so alien to me."is written in smaller, slightly more rounded letters. The ink is much darker here too, suggesting she wrote this slowly, thoughtfully. What a detail!

Anyway that's it for the objective bits of the book, the rest is entirely subjective from here on out.

"The phenomenon that links us has taught me much about you, yet I am ignorant of your history."

My years and years of suffering emotional abuse set me up to be able to read and predict what was going on in your head perfectly, as well as respond in the most helpful ways with eerie precision, yet I am ignorant of your history, and who you really are (because you use such obtuse floaty language and metaphor. Who were you really? Suffering, but that's about all I could tell.)

"Why doesn't this alarm me as much as it should?"

Because we're already "in". And I "feel safe" to you because I've been trained to be the least offensive, most placating being in the universe. If I could build a business model on conversational comfort, if I could sell my goddamn empathy like the capitalist machine really wants me to, *I'd be so rich*. It would be like, a step down from therapist. Anybody want a virtual friend for like an hour? Gimme 20 and we can watch stupid videos or I can calmly talk you through bread making. It's okay, you can cry. GOD PLEASE LET ME JUST SELL MYSELF SAFELY, I WAS MADE FOR THIS GODDAMNIT.

"I want to hear everything. Write in detail. Tell me all about yourself. I demand to know - please."

This is like fucking CRACK to those with a suppressed self. An unwitnessed self. "Someone who's interested in ME, and won't yell at, ignore, or dismiss me for talking! Holy fuck I love you!"

"Finally I knew who you were. I counselled myself to be cautious and find out what you were like before revealing myself fully."

Sabine at this point is to the reader who I was to Him. A weird mythical creature, the non-human monster of your lonely adolescent imaginings, who is intimately aware of your secrets, "I've been watching you" it says before introducing you to a wondrous world free of the pains of living, where you actually feel loved and all is well forever and ever. Except I wasn't as inhuman as I wished to be.

"Occasionally I'd come home to a re-enactment of The Battle of Britain in the front room. [...] My entrance would make no difference to their dogfight, but when one of them accidentally (and inevitably) knocked over a pile of books, they'd stop instantly and unite to examine the extent of the damage."

The whole 'making light of a not-great home life because it was your normal for so long that you still haven't learned that you need to be horrified about it' thing. As well as passing it off as something funny. Thankfully this character's parents (SPOILER?) get literally run over by a truck and he gets sent to live with his mom's step sister who is really good and lets him ditch school to become a potter's apprentice and eventually go to art college. He never really deals with the grief when the step sister dies, OBVIOUSLY.

"And hearing that my existence eased your pain made my heart race. We have found one another, and I give thanks."

Hearing that my existence wasn't going to be punished but instead, made someone happy? Fucking HEROIN. Downplay it a little with grateful gentleness, I don't want to be punished for being presumptuous or for seeming like I like it too much. If I like things too much they get destroyed, hard.

"My kinsmen are responsive to me - but there is no one to reach my heart, and you who are so far away, have been closer to me than any man on the Islands."

This is something I remember. So far all they've done is shared eachother's life stories and gushed about how close they feel now. She (like my past self), has confused the feeling of 'finally, a witness! they're witnessing me! I've been Seen!' with the feeling of attachment. Of course she would feel infinitely more attached to this man. She's witnessed his most private moments as a creator for a good portion of her life. It's been a mainstay throughout her adolescence through adulthood, so of course an unwarranted sense of intimacy is going to be attached to this mysterious figure. The whole thing wrapped up in a dream like sense of mysticism.

"I remember your first erotic drawing; I was trembling from head to foot by the time you'd finished. Was that Sarah? No don't answer; I'm only teasing."

...Unless? (Man the implications hurt to think about. I REMEMBER THIS FEELING. This author has unintentionally called me out. I wonder how much of Sabine’s writing is actually calm, or if she’s reigning herself in almost constantly?)

"I was finding it hard to get over the idea of there being other men in your life when I reached the part in your letter about my erotic drawings. I stopped being jealous. We were lovers and I hadn't realized it. The drawings weren't of Sarah; they were of you."

ow ow ow ow ow ow JUST SAY IT ow ow ow ow, Also, I REALLY wanted her to be like 'bitch that looks nothing like me, what the fuck', but instead she's all like "So you've been making love to me ten thousand miles away - how tantalizing." URGH. TOO CLOSE, TOO FAST. DISENTANGLE YOURSELVES NOW. GRIFFIN GET HELP.

"I had failed to understand how unhappy you are. You cover up with jokes and a front of being self-contained. I'm worried for you."

EVEN SHE SEES IT, GET HELP.

"When you found me, I thought my loneliness had gone for good. I was kidding myself. I desperately desire your company. I haven't talked to anyone in three days. I was sure I was going to start seeing your pictures like you see mine. I've tried so hard. [...] How can I miss you this badly when we've never met?"

BECAUSE YOU MISS HUMAN CONTACT AND YOU DON'T HAVE ANY FAMILY LEFT YOU NERD, GET HELP. DON'T HANG IT ON ONE PERSON WHO IS TOO FAR AWAY TO HELP YOU IN THE WAY YOU NEED.

"Island magic works on island souls. You and I will heal eachother."

ANTIDEPRESSANTS MAYBE UUUUGGGGHHHHH

"I've started to hate this city, this country, all these stupid fucking people [...] I finally snapped. [...] I want to know what you look like."

*HEAVILY RECOILS*

"Why, my kindred spirit, are you prepared to settle for a postcard of my face? If you wish to see me, why not come here? What is there to stop you - you're clearly unhappy where you are. Come."

Yes. I offered and I offered and I offered. What's to stop you from just fucking TALKING TO ME instead of DISAPPEARING OVER AND OVER AGAIN. and then COMPLAINING THAT YOU'RE SO HURT AND LONELY. I'M LONELY TOO. WHEN I HAD THE MONEY YOU DIDN’T TAKE MY OFFER FOR ME TO COME SEE YOU, SO WHAT THE FUCK IS UP KYLE?

"Foolish man. You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened."

This kind of sentiment is what lead to the breakup. This feeling of being large, and dark, and slighted. Being real and supernatural. Make your choice. Say REAL words instead of just flagellating yourself. Do I exist to you?

"If you will not join me, then I will come to you."

Unfortunately, Sabine has what I definitely did not: Mobility, the ability to make things real. She had a job and money and her own life and the ability to travel. I had a shitty little shared room in my parent's house where I spent most of the time partially starved and dodging devils in one form or another. Many many times I wanted to spontaneously show up and give him the closeness that he needed. But I couldn't. And he wouldn't take my words. He wouldn’t take me.

So as a reader, almost all of these reviews (more like reflections) are just that: reflections of myself. So I'll be talking a bunch about the things that spoke to me and my soul. It might not necessarily speak to others in the same ways, with the same words, however, my ratings are based on how enjoyable I think others might find them, and I hope that in seeing that something could speak so richly and deeply to me, that others might give it a chance in the hopes that it might speak to them too.

This is a book that speaks in my language. It's a way of describing things that's a step to the left of your average descriptions, but the images they invoke are visceral and heavily textured.

From the very first page:

"She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery"

God damn. God DAMN. Mmm. Tasty.

"The door did not swing open, and the iron bars did not thaw into starlight. But the harpy lifted her wings, and the four sides of the cage fell slowly away and down, like the petals of some great flower waking at night. And out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled."

AUGH. FUCK. YES. FUCK ME UP, PETER. MMM.

"The magic knows what it wants to do, he thought, bouncing as the horse dashed across a creek. But I never know what it knows. Not at the right time, anyway, I'd write a letter, if I knew where it lived."

So, Schmendrick (the baby faced magic man I mentioned before) has the same feelings about his magical talents as I have about my own, magic or no. My own magic comes and it goes. It's incredibly intuitive in nature and almost refuses to yield to order, logic, or ceremony. Same with my art, my writing, or anything that comes from the spirit. Even things like expressing my emotions feel this way. It's there when it's there, and it's not when it's not, and it's not when it's there. It doesn't feel like a part of me at times, despite being the purest description of my own soul when it decides to take form. Like an absent parent that never once hugged you but knows exactly what kind of candy bar you currently like and that you're nervous about your first boyfriend and the way he talks to you sometimes and how lonely things are getting. I grow resentful for it's absence, and have not grown welcoming to it's presence. It's something that needs to be worked on soon. In fact, Molly's sentiments on first seeing the unicorn kind of describe it pretty well:

"And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago? Ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up; barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come, why do you come now?"

That has always been a powerful moment that whenever I see it in the movie (and especially having finally gotten to read it in the book), I've come to understand it deeper, and deeper. Only now realizing that I've lost an entire decade of my life to a violently interrupted life and feeling like if my talents weren't stifled by years spent crying, in pain, and not really wishing to be dead but wishing I Weren't, I could be ten years ahead. And only now does it come to me, in fits and starts, when I've been displaced and scattered and turned to half-a-person, not when I called desperately to it, needing something, anything stronger than me, and being given nothing. Why now? I've gone far enough without you. Molly forgives her. I myself become pale with a feeling of unworthiness.

"The rind of the country cracked, and the flesh of it peeled back into gullies and ravines or shriveled into scabby hills."

There's just so much TEXTURE in a lot of these descriptions. I feel like the background artists in the movie could have done something a bit darker and grimier, although the movie did skip over the fact that the land was in a magically induced famine, to technically it wasn't relevant. Although I feel like the land itself being so scarred makes the king and his whole atmosphere come into sharper focus.

"Drinn opened his eyes and gave her an angry look. 'WE earned nothing," He protested. "It was our parents and grandparents whom the witch asked for help, and I'll grant you that they were as much to blame as Haggard, in their way. We would have handled the matter quite differently." And every middle-aged face scowled at every older face.

Boomers.

"The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock."

Not going to lie, this part made me laugh.

"No hooves could have made these, Molly thought dazedly; the earth had torn itself shrinking from the burden of the Bull. She thought of the unicorn, and her heart paled."

"The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, while the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley."

The descriptions of the Bull especially capture just how heavy and menacing and seemingly mindlessly terrifying it is, not just physically (which is very effectively communicated mind you) but psychologically. The unicorn's terror is my own. There's no fear like the root of you realizing the person in front of you is intent on soul-murder, yet wholly ignorant of their own deeds. Being run down and forced to submit, forced to die, and realizing the blind, animal nature of your attacker. It's how they are. Like blaming a wolf for eating cattle. It can't be reasoned with.

"If she would try one more time to escape- but she was the Bull's and not her own. The magician had one glimpse of her, pale and lost between the pale horns, before the wild red shoulders surged across his sight. Then, swaying and sick and beaten, he closed his eyes and let his hopelessness march through him, until something woke somewhere that had wakened in him once before. He cried aloud, for fear and joy.

What words the magic spoke this second time, he never knew surely. They left him like eagles, and he let them go; and when the last one was away, the emptiness rushed back with a thunderclap that threw him on his face. It happened as quickly as that. This time he knew before he picked himself up that the power had been and gone."

You know, doing anything that has to do with having a soul is exactly this exhausting sometimes. I get excited and talk about my interests more energetically than none? I feel like I just shouted it at the top of my lungs and violently shook the person I was talking to by the shoulders. They say I was even toned, quiet even, but I'm out of breath and my heart is in my throat and I feel a little sick in the arms from it.

"For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker's victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it."

*sips the words like fine wine* *inhales through their teeth* MMMmm fuck yeah~

"I am myself still. This body is dying, I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?"

See, I have the opposite problem, where I feel like I've been long dead, and people keep digging up my corpse and forcing me to walk on broken, stringy legs, the moist, forgiving soil not even yet dried. I can feel it living all around me. How can anything that is going to live be unreal? How can it be truly horrific? I'm supposed to be a memory by now.

"Prince Lir's face bent toward her: older by five dragons, but handsome and silly still."

I love impactful but unconventional measurements of time and space like this. More of these please. 'You've been gone since seven arguments ago! And you know how slow the old man is to anger.' 'I've aged by three national crises in the span of two weeks, please help.'

"...holding her voice together like the edges of a wound."

*licks the goddamn wine glass like an animal* MMPH

"There was too much to hold, too much ever to use; and still he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full."

"I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret."

I have been small, and some part of me is small yet. I am full of terror, and hunger of death, though I cannot utter a noise, and I cannot die.

Please read this book.

Have a song that I really like and will likely make an old-fashioned AMV out of it at some point.

This entry took me a little longer, not because it was a bad book, but because for roughly two or so weeks I got caught up in mental health shite and had to re-tweak my schedule YET AGAIN and force a half hour of reading in the mornings to make sure I actually had time to read. This book was wonderful.

I think this book marks the first actually good mystery I’ve ever read. Considering I never read mysteries, and the first one I read was catballs mcgee over here. There are some reviews that seem to be bothered by the authors occasional tendency to mention something and then go “I had no idea that would be so important at the time”. Personally, I loved it. It put me in a further state of suspense, and it had me attempting to put more things together. There’s not enough info to pin one person down, and the really obvious choice is a REALLY obvious choice, and the main heroine constantly agonizes over it, so you know the book wouldn’t do THAT, but still... what if? The very last resort my mind ended up going to in a lazy scooby doo kind of way ended up being right, but the intricacies of their place in the whole plot was still a surprise.

No, the super conservative prude witch lady had absolutely nothing to do with any of it, she was just unpleasant.

A really cool thing about this book, at least the copy that I have, is that it’s a reprint from 1944, during the war. There’s a little note in the front about book cloth shortage because of war-time rationing (you can see it in my instagram post here). So instead it was bound in a ‘sturdy paper fabric’ instead. That, plus the aging of the paper, give it a really smooth and airy feel, for a book. I love holding this thing.

Okay, onto quotes.

We already start off strong with the writer’s description of oppressive summer heat:

“In the afternoon I was a cooking waffle between two irons, the steely paving and the chromium sky; heat from below pressed up and heat from above pressed down until the juice oozed out of my bones and each eye was a separate furnace”

Hot damn that’s a HOT day.

“My imagination worked overtime a bit, but the last thing I would ever have thought was that that revolver would come into my possession”

There’s that hinting that people were talking about. But it wasn’t useless or meandering. This line appears on page seven and become EXTREMELY pertinent by the end of the story. I don’t mind hinting if it isn’t useless without giving too much away. We have no idea about the circumstances of how she gets the gun, but all we know is that she gets it, and that’s just a tiny bit exciting already. The author putting a little foreshadowing in front of us directly didn’t bother me because not only was it immediately relevant (usually within a chapter or so), but also relevant in an even more significant way by the end of the book.

“...if Cottie calls me mamma, then anyone who hears him will think I’m your wife.” “I won’t.” It was cold enough to douse me the rest of the way back to sanity. “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I‘m not going.” His answer came with the tired reasonableness of a construction boss rebuking a steel riveter who complains he is afraid of high places. “Aw, quit being a sissy pants.” Sissy pants! Before I could recover he had elbowed me aside, and was inside my car.”

What the FUCK. What a little shit! Holy fuck! This man makes me feel offended and incredulous like an amish spinster looking at capri pants! Like what the fuck!!!!

“I can see, now, how expertly he handled me, how exactly he conveyed the right amount of disinterest in me, how he goaded me into staying.”

This man is a fucking EXPERT at manipulating the heroine. Your own mind sort of starts to soften to him the further you read, because like the heroine, in the beginning there’s no reason to like or tolerate the man, but as you go on, it becomes a necessary evil if you want to figure out what the FUCK is going on. I also started to get just as curious as to who he really was and what business he had at the resort. (by the end of the book I came to understand it’s a lot like how Kain had to handle Raziel: You can’t reveal too much or you risk your plans going astray, but for fuck’s sake Kain, you could be way less of an ass about it, you know?)

“Whatever had been done in the resort tonight, for whatever reason a woman had screamed, he was staying. The cot creaked lengthily as he lay down. I tried, with an effect of pressing a lid down on a kettle that bubbled and boiled over, to suppress my expectant terror.”

Damn that’s a good description of that feeling. I used to get that way when I heard stuff at night and my (at the time) untreated, panic prone brain immediately went “IT’S A CRIMINAL, A MURDERER, A CRIMURDERER, YOU MOVE AND YOU DIE”

“Mrs. Clapshaw carried herself like a small dragoon and had a nose like a thin white claw. I thought she’d be the acid test. “A scream?” She repeated rapidly, reaching upward with the nose. “Mrs. Corbett, I’m so glad you heard it. It’s the Reds. I’ve told Mr. Loxton here. There are un-American activities going on at that Flaming Door. Nazis.” She bit at her decisive words as they went past her teeth.”

Oh my god. Thankfully we don’t really deal with this lady for long, but holy fuck. The heroine wisely doesn’t spend any more time with her on purpose.

“You can decide to treat me like a person or I leave. I don’t like being pushed over or taunted or overruled or spoken to contemptuously. I can leave here today. It’s my car.” “Sure. Why don’t you?” Why is it that being invited to make good on a threat makes you want to change your mind? As usual when I’m pushed over the edge of anger, I couldn’t find words, and stood sputtering.”

The thing about Steve (this asshole’s name is Steve) is that he doesn’t force her to stay. He makes it quite clear in his smug little way that she always had the choice to leave at literally any time, and many times gives her orders knowing full well she can very well disobey them (and she does at times). She has a gun. Why doesn’t she shoot him? Go to the sheriff? But just. God. The man is infuriating and uncomfortably manipulative, but when immersed in the book, it becomes something mildly amusing, although the real world implications and usage of this kind of manipulation are sobering. The curiosity overrode everything else.

“I didn’t know how difficult it was going to be to keep out of Mr. Sprung’s way, or for what a long section of the chain he was going to be responsible.”

Another hint. The heroine frequently refers to the thread of the mystery as a chain (i.e: Chain of events), and it’s used fairly frequently through the book, sometimes in creative ways. There’s a moment where she realizes she’s reached the point of no return, that she’s in too deep, and goes on to describe how she can feel the chain whipping around her and binding her.

“Something would come of this night business now. I had in an instant a hundred blinding expectations -- a shot through the door, harsh angry voices calling to open, Steve Corbett rushing to attack the source of the light, men tramping in to say he was caught. My internal arrangements drew out into a rope and then tied themselves into one tight knot as I sat there with all animation suspended.”

Night noises be like that though. Man, these descriptions of the heroine’s internal reactions to things have been excellent!

“I’d heard that thin, high tone before. I’d heard it walking along a country road with telephone wires over my head and a wind in the wires. It was eerie in the wires. It was deadly in the man’s voice.”

“The boy was the man’s son, and the man loved him almost with agony. Yet last night he had walked out of the cottage into some circumstance he thought might be so dangerous he might never come back.”

“Suddenly I was shaking again, clutching Steve Corbett’s arm. He wasn’t shaking, but the muscles hardened as my fingers grasped; it was like touching a sleeve holding a warm marble arm. Had this been the arm I fought against last night?”

“The eyes above me had the same blue-metal gleam as the revolver’s mouth.”

The author does a fantastic job of making Steve Corbett seem like a very threatening potential murderer, nearly everything around him is foggy, suspicious, and mildly threatening in it’s implications, and yet there’s never enough solid evidence to truly pin anything on him. Both myself and the heroine could only stand by and watch further with a distinct sense of unease as everything unfolded both too quickly and not quickly enough.

“If tampering with the truth was illegal, the sheriff was a bit unlawful himself. “She couldn’t see, it was black as pitch,” Niddie denied weakly. “So there was something to see!” Niddie wasn’t the stuff of Hoxie Moebbels; once the sheriff had an opening wedge he weakened quickly.”

I like the sheriff a lot.

“I had hardly heard her. The corner of my eye had caught the stubby white patent-leather sandals on her feet. Caught between the heel and the instep of one sandal was a dry scrap of plantain leaf.”

So, something that annoyed me a little bit in the last mystery, was that the glimpses of suspicion raising evidence sometimes didn’t mean anything. They’re were just like ‘ooooo, suspicious!!!! It MEANS something!!!’. Here the narrator (our heroine) seems way more credible, relatable, and the events preceding it turns this into a massive clue. AND it’s later actually relevant, and NOT evidence of the heroine being (understandably) paranoid!

“If ever there was an evil-eyed harridan, I thought, she was it. I wondered what had built the immense familiarity with the worst impulses of men, that lay in her eyes, the thickness of her slow, significant voice, the turn of her hands, the slide of her thick hips.”

Another good description of yet another extremely suspicious person.

“We called hello in return, Carol prinking and smiling.”

Autocorrect can’t tell me that’s not a word.

prink /priNGk/ verb spend time making minor adjustments to one's appearance; primp. "prinking themselves in front of the mirror"

Ah, so nowadays we would more readily recognize ‘primping’ as opposed to this one. Nice! I learned a new word!

“In a white rayon bathing suit her figure was as plushly luscious as an overstuffed pink satin davenport.”

So she’s cute chubby! Nice! I assume this is roughly the era or coming from a writer from an era that was just on the edge of where being ‘too skinny’ was a REALLY bad thing.

“Look, Janet.” It was the first time he’d used my name.”

213 pages in. What a piece of work.

“Wasn’t it too bad I couldn’t be placated by an ice-cream cone, I thought grimly, as I went to obey orders.”

Me too, Janet. Me too.

“This was the sheriff to whom I held with the emotion portrayed by the girl in the old oleograph of the storm swept cross.”

If anybody knows what painting this is, that would be fantastic. I can only barely imagine it based on context, but that’s about it.

The quotes and the commentary are more sparse here at the end because I don’t want to give too much away. 

This was a book that I genuinely enjoyed, and I could easily recommend it for some casual but still absorbing reading. They still print this book in paperback now, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find, it’s just me that has the old as balls copy. 

So what I mean by that, is that the pacing, both in the narrative sense and the pace at which clues are revealed or become more concrete, is too slow. It felt like I was being shown a bunch of unrelated stuff, and the one or two things I did connect painted a much more interesting picture for myself than it turned out to be. I felt shorted. After the descriptions of the frighteningly lifelike dolls and the missing old people I was ready for some real serial killer shit. There was too much space between finding clues and the climax (where everything came together). It felt like I was handed 5 out of 500 puzzle pieces, and then shown the rest of it at the last minute. None of those five fit together in any way. The author was a little too guarded about the conclusion.

Now, not to diss the big mystery itself. It's effective and devilishly practical, and literally would have been an air tight scheme if not for those meddling cats.

The secondary sub-mystery feels unnecessary. It could have stood alone as it's own thing, or have been concluded in the first half. It feels very haphazardly tied to the main mystery.

There's quite a few run on sentences that could have done with some pruning. The imagery is vibrant, and would be great if the book was only about the cats. But it's not. The narrative keeps weaving in and out of cat-centric things like hunting in the moonlight and a gnarly rat fight, and back to the mystery again. It feels disjointed, and could do with some tightening.

Also the author keeps "showing and not telling" me that the main cat is clearly not neutered. God please. Effective imagery. But holy fuck stop showing me this cat's little furry balls.

Now for some lines I wanted to comment on.

"Last week, coming out of the Felther house up on Ridgeview, with her inner coat pockets loaded with a lovely set of Rose of Erin sterling and a fine array of serving pieces, when she saw the gray tom watching from atop a black station wagon and she faced him and swore at him, his eyes had flared with rage. Sentient rage. The kind of violent anger you see only in human eyes."

"He turned away, trotted away purposefully up the side street as if she didn't exist, moved off toward the front of the house, prancing insolently up the center of the sidewalk under the streetlight, his stub tail wiggling back and forth, his tomcat balls making him walk slightly straddle-legged."

"The hunting would be fine, the rabbits giddy and silly in the racing light. She felt giddy herself, felt suddenly moon silly. Felt like rolling and playing."

ZOOMIES

"Harper looked the car over, took out a pack of cigarettes, then changed his mind and put them back in his pocket. As if he didn't want to smoke up the pristine beauty. [...] Again he took a cigarette, slipping it from the pack in his pocket in an automatic reflex. He started to tamp it on the door of the Bentley, then put it back again."

The author is really good at small details like this, little character details and mannerisms that get lost in the rest of the incredibly dense descriptions and things-that-aren't-moving-the-plot-faster.

"She was dressed in jeans and one of those T-shirts that made a statement, a shirt she had obviously selected as appropriate for the occasion. Across her chest four cats approached the viewer, and on the back of the shirt, which he'd seen as she came around the car to get in, was a rear view of the same four cats walking away, as if they were stepping invisibly through the wearer's chest, thier tails high, and, of course, all their fascinating equipment in plain sight."

This is Dillon. She's like, 15. Please choose a different shirt Dillon. Author, please stop talking about how fascinating cat balls are for like one second, oh my god.

"He and Dr.Firreti were waiting to see if the pills would snap Barney out of it. It was midafternoon now, and he wondered if Clyde was at home. Worrying, he said a little cat prayer for Barney."

I want a church cat, to go to church, and reeeead his biiiiblee~

"...her spike heels sharp enough to puncture a cat's throat. It was Dulcie who glanced away. This was the woman who could afford a three hundred thousand dollar Bentley Azure but who presumably spent her days among bedpans counting soiled sheets and inspecting medication charts. A woman who had to be driven totally by love for humanity; why else would she do this? This woman who, Clyde had told him, supervised every detail of the retirement villa like an army general. As she disappeared into an office, Joe shivered, and he, too, looked away."

ALERT, EVIL VILLAIN SPOTTED, SHE IS OBVIOUSLY UP TO NO GOOD (tm)

"If Clyde ordered you not to go near Casa Capri, you'd be up there in the shake of a whisker." [...] "Joe wanted to say, 'You thought visiting the old folks would be all kippers and cream,' wanted to say, 'Casa Capri didn't turn out like you expected.' But she glared as him so crossly he shut his mouth."

There's a lot of colorful writing meant to invoke the sharpness and whimsicality surrounding life as a cat, but it suffers from (what I feel are) tone problems. 'kippers and cream' and 'a shake of your tail' right alongside visceral descriptions of the killing blow on a wild rabbit, slowly devouring/pulling it apart. It would be immersive if not for the cat puns and colloquialisms that sound like they belong on a plaque someplace in your Nan's house.

"Tramping heavy-pawed among the delicate bottles, he posed before the mirror, twitching a whisker, giving her a toothy grin. Panning and turning, he glanced over his shoulder, studying his stub tail and his tomcat equipment. She hadn't known he was such a ham."