Last time, her craaaaaaaazy uncle is actually just a magic user or something. How shocking.

9.15

So they drive off in silence. You know, given he didn’t have a car, how was he planning to get home? I’d like to think it would involve walking, since that seems like the thing someone in a small town with limited transportation would be good at, but there’s been no sign of that at all.

Apparently he’s the one doing the driving, which I wouldn’t think much of except that it means we don’t see her ever driving when he could do it. He ends up not turning off to his house because he’s not ready.

“You think my uncle is crazy, like everyone else. Just say it. Old Man Ravenwood.”

Um, no, your uncle is clearly not crazy. That wasn’t crazy we saw, unless it was Emothan going crazy. Terrifying, yeah, he nearly shit his pants, but crazy is the person who thinks food appears and vanishes or things fly across the room with no one touching them, not the one glowering malevolently into your soul as that happens in front of you.

Her voice was bitter. “I need to get home.”

But, back to the strained dynamic we have now. Because he’s driving, he’s got all the power even though apparently she’s pretty uncomfortable with him right now and wants him gone.

See, if she was driving, he could have just spoken up and asked her to stop the car a minute because they needed to talk. Then she’d reply, “What’s to talk about? You think my uncle is crazy, like everyone else.” for whatever reason she believes that, and we’d be spared the sense that she is, once again, trapped in a car with someone she’s nervous being around. If she’s meant to be okay with talking to him instead of trapped into it, her willingly stopping the car instead of continuing on would show us this.

Meanwhile, the car is circling this tiny grassy park area that has a statue of Civil War General Jubal A. Early. The General stood his ground, just as he always had, which now struck me as sort of wrong.

It just now struck you as sort of wrong to fight for slavery.

Everything had changed; everything kept changing. I was different, seeing things and feeling things and doing things that even a week ago would have seemed impossible. It felt like the General should have changed, too.

Oh, so it still hasn’t struck you as sort of wrong to fight for slavery. I should have known better.

Change is not inherently good and standing your ground against it isn’t bad just because change happens.

And it’s certainly not that applicable to the Civil War – even the idea they were fighting to protect their way of life is somewhat dubious, and it was definite to protect the specific institution of people-owning in whatever form than an actual broad culture. Bear in mind the main reason the northern states had gotten so militant about abolition was because the southern states had expanded the range of slavery to keep rubbing it in their faces, both legislating that free states did not exist and also ensuring that even legally free people were just the slaves of the first guy who could point them out to a judge and say that no really, that guy was definitely his escaped slave consider the facts that he has dark skin and slaves have dark skin.

It’s this escalation that actually triggers the Civil War – if they hadn’t decided to play legal chicken in response to people smuggling slaves into free territories, the majority of the north would have continued ignoring what was going on. It’s actually this area that’s the best fodder for those alternate timelines where the Confederacy is still around – the Union was pretty grudging about having to fight at all, so without the Confederacy’s prior dickery, if they’d actually just stuck to things as they’d been, you might well get people saying that it’s not worth it – I mean basically all they were good for was cotton, and they’d keep trading us the cotton. There was already all sorts of strife over how much power the slave states had in Congress compared to their actual population, and trade relations could continue profitably with them being separate countries – possibly more so since no one would stop them from just running their population into the ground. The Confederacy would have bandits head north to kidnap people for slaves and the abolitionists would keep launching terrorist strikes against them until the south finally rotted away or did something crazy in response to their declining power.

Incidentally, the core reason they couldn’t “change” is actually the aristocracy. One of the big ways people try to explain how the Confederacy could have won in those AUs is that they free the slaves, and people will counterargue that’s impossible because that was the whole point, but the underlying issue is that the Confederacy was an aristocracy, which, and this is the key part, means people will not do work. Doing work is a thing slaves do. It is low-class. That’s why the north had industry and art and the south had cotton and scurvy. You free the slaves and you’ve removed the only class of people you have that do anything useful. No one else will do anything but dress up as a soldier or swing a whip around.

Read the accounts after the war, and you’ll see that’s what traumatized them so much and where the stuff about Union brutality comes from. I remember someone rhapsodizing over how there was this beautiful plantation house with this beautiful shade tree and yet outside this old guy was cutting it down and it was because he had to sell the wood for money. The horrors of Reconstruction were people having to produce goods to exchange for money instead of having other, darker skinned people to do that for them. That’s the brutality, the act of having to do physical work.

I turned down Dove Street and pulled the hearse over alongside the curb, right under the sign that said welcome to gatlin, home of the south’s most unique historic plantation homes.

And here we have a good illustration of how exaggerated they are about the horrors inflicted on them. Sherman burned all those except Ravenwood, remember?

Myths are seldom true in the strictest sense, but they usually contain a larger truth that is conveyed all the more powerfully by the fact that it is not detained about mundane points of accuracy. In the case of Sherman’s march, the myth is so compelling that people hold to it despite obvious contradictions, which are explained away or simply ignored. A reporter discovered this in 1958 while researching a story about the Civil War in Marietta, Georgia. A Southern matron with whom he spoke gave him a glass of iced tea and told him earnestly that Sherman’s demons had burned the town to the ground when they came through in 1864. Afterward, the reporter commented dryly, “we went outside to admire the fine antebellum homes.”

“What are you doing?”
I turned the car off. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t park with guys.” It was a joke, but I could hear it in her voice. She was petrified.

To which he responds, “Start talking.”

So here we have the authors aware that all of this is very threatening to women, but at the same time not seeing it as actually anything wrong to have happen. It’s just her lot in life that a sixteen year old girl alone in a car with a sixteen year old boy is going to be afraid. He has no responsibility in any of it. It’s a thing that just happens, somehow, without it being anyone’s fault.

She doesn’t want to explain, but he keeps pressing her, making it clear that yes, he saw all the supernatural stuff. She says he just doesn’t understand and never will and the fact he’s getting frustrated by her refusal to explain anything proves he’s just like the rest of them and doesn’t really want to deal with people who are different, because obviously wanting to know about how different they are proves he hates the idea, to which he responds not with sanity but with a lecture about how she’s just afraid to love trust anyone. Then he tells her she’s super awesome and she says she still doesn’t want to tell him because she just wants to be normal, okay, then

There was a rap on the window
…
“Kids get lost on your way home?” Fatty. He was grinning like he’d stumbled across two doughnuts on the side of the road.

Yes he sure is terrible checking on a stopped car to make sure everything’s okay. And how dare he find it funny that it’s two teenagers!

Note also that given Lena was scared, she’s likely relieved to know there’s a police officer around and that if Emothan was planning to do anything, he probably won’t now. But hey, that wasn’t a thing Emothan was worried about, so fuck you fatso! (Actually, I think his only other appearance so far was to be the only person in town who was understanding when they were slightly late for school, so… But no, he’s fat, let’s hate him because clearly he’s a disgusting thug of a pig.)

And he goes home, no longer able to badger her about stuff she doesn’t want to talk to. Damn that fat policeman.

That night she comes over and his window opens by magic. He goes down to talk. She says she’s a Caster and oh god they’re all witches aren’t they. Please at least be werewolf witches or vampire witches or cthulhu witches or something beyond generic wicca bullshit.

“Like, witches?”
“Ethan. Don’t be ridiculous.”
I exhaled, momentarily relieved. Of course, I was an idiot. What was I thinking?
“That’s such a stupid word, really. It’s like saying jocks. Or geeks. It’s just a dumb stereotype.”

This is the most interesting Lena’s been! I mean, it’s not really original or anything but I just like that she’s going at this from a completely different direction than anyone normal. It speaks to different priorities and I am always for that. She explains that everyone in her family has varying talents, so she can’t be specific.

“We’re Casters. That’s the broadest definition. We all have powers. We’re gifted, just like some families are smart, and others are rich, or beautiful, or athletic.”

So apparently the south really does do nothing but marry their cousins, because otherwise you don’t get fixed traits in a family line forever. Or maybe it’s just the magic ones who are super inbred and she’s just assuming all families work that way.

Hm but that doesn’t explain why Pretty Suit would be so okay with her marrying a shitblood like Emothan, unless his family is actually a lost branch. Or possibly Pretty Suit’s education has made him realize they’re in desperate need of a few outcrosses to shore up the bloodline and help get rid of that hemophilia that’s been dogging them.

Anyway he explains that his family is just as crazy because his dad is grieving and black mommy makes magic charms so isn’t everyone weird? She’s comforted and leaves, and he then takes a minute to realize that wow that was a ton of bullshit they are magic users holy shit what has he gotten into.

9.24

He realizes that holy shit I have a super crush on this girl. While yeah, you are definitely obsessed you sure don’t seem interested in her that way. It’s a shame you don’t have internet or read modern books or maybe you’d know what gay people are.

He hangs out with her and asks about her notebook and she explains it’s poetry and he can’t read it and thank god I do not need to see the author’s idea of her poetry. Then he uses the spoon he was eating pudding with to mark his place in a book and when she’s grossed out by it he just explains it’s a thing he learned from his mom:

she’d use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork.”

and yeah I don’t believe that, it’s just the author trying to hammer in QUIRKY but you literally can’t even use those things as a bookmark unless you don’t ever want to read that book again.

“Bet that drove Amma crazy.”
“It drove her nuts. No, wait for it—she was—” I dug deep. “P. E. R. T. U. R. B. E. D.”

I’ve been doing my best to just ignore this but it keeps doing this whole ten dollar word spelling thing for synonyms constantly because THE CHARACTER IS QUIRKY AND LIKES CROSSWORDS HAVE YOU NOTICED YET HAVE YOU HAVE YOU, and they’re always horrible and less appropriate than the original word and I’m pretty sure the author is literally just grabbing a thesaurus and picking a word at random and I hate my life.

Then she talks about her charm necklace. She has a tiny gold bird which is a raven because ravens are gold I guess and she says they’re the most powerful birds in the Caster world and there’s no explanation if she means this symbolically or on the spiritual plane or if you turn into one you can do this or if regular ravens can just straight up explode your head.

Legend has it that they can draw energy into themselves and release it in other forms.

Right so do they actually do this? It’s not like there’s any shortage of ravens around, I think you’d know if they were doing this or not. Also, does this mean nothing else can do that? Because that’s what it sounds, but in that case it’s not that they’re the strongest, it’s that they’re the only magic birds at all, unless there’s some form of magic that isn’t gathering and releasing energy.

Then she’s got a soda tab that’s from the first one she drank, that her grandmother gave her because she was crying over how no one put anything in my valentine shoebox at school.” which is precisely why every school I know of mandates that you give identical little card thingies to every kid in the class. I don’t know, maybe Virginia doesn’t mind dealing with the whining and the crying and the angry parents.

“I know it just looks like a bunch of junk. But I’ve never lived anywhere very long. I’ve never had the same house, or the same room for more than a few years, and sometimes I feel like the little pieces of me on this chain are all I have.”

Yeah, that’s a pretty good explanation! This book would be a lot better if it was more focused on her and weirdness and less on Emothan being bored.

What do you do when you realize you might have feelings for a girl who will barely admit to being your friend? A girl whose uncle kicked you out of their house

See? Back to Emothan and the book’s shit again. Her uncle thought you were great, he kicked you out because you pulled out the freaky haunted locket that one spiritual person had already freaked at and kicked you out of the house over.

We finally get some real proof he’s actually attracted to her

I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish-green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her. I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again.

So I guess he’s not just gay. Maybe he’s castersexual. Actually, that might fit with him being a lost branch of the family. Maybe that’s why they’re inbred, they only really find other magic users hot, and that’s why Pretty Suit was so happy his niece had managed to find a casterblood who was at least a few generations removed for once as her future husband.

Oh, and he’s now even better at basketball my lack of caring let me show you it.

Then he and Lena go to the movies and the evil jocks are all OMMMMMGG you have a DAAAAAAATTTE.

Hooking up was the main reason kids from Gatlin went to the Cineplex, considering any movie showing there was already on DVD. But it was the only reason you sat in the last three rows.

Seriously the writing of this is so terrible. Even just changing the “but” to “and” would do so much to improve things.

Also once again, seeing a movie on a big screen is way more awesome than at home, shut the fuck up.

But Lena picks sitting in the back to avoid the rest of the gang, and he doesn’t tell her what this means.

Why didn’t you say anything?
I didn’t know.
Liar.
I’ll be a perfect gentleman. Honest.

Appropriate answers include “I thought you knew” or “I wasn’t sure what to say” or anything other than pretending you totally didn’t know she picked to sit in the makeoutzone. And if you do that, then no, you are obviously not someone who can be trusted to be a perfect gentleman.

The movie was terrible. Ten minutes in, I already knew the ending.
“He did it,” I whispered.
“What?”
“That guy. He’s the murderer. I don’t know who he kills, but he did it.” That was the other reason Link didn’t want to sit by me: I always knew the ending at the beginning and I couldn’t keep it to myself. It was my version of doing the crossword.

So he’s got some sort of magic knowledge powers. Also, this doesn’t make sense. If he always knows, then it’s completely unrelated to how good or bad the movie is, so why start with saying the movie is terrible? I really think the author is just making this up as they go along and not editing it. I yell at fanfic authors for this all the time and I rarely see it in anything halfway decent, so how the fuck is it in a published book?

It was the reason I was so good at video games, carnival games, checkers with my dad. I could figure things out, right from the first move.

1) What videogames? You don’t play videogames, if you did you’d have something resembling opinions on them. Also, videogames these days have multiplayer which means talking to people online. I can’t speak for the quality of those conversations but either you’d run into someone interesting by sheer force of statistics or else you’d at least stop going on about how everything bad is because you live in this one small town and if you just left it everyone outside must be awesome.

2) Carnival games are just rigged. Everyone knows that. You’re not clever for that.

3) Wtf is checkers doing there? It’s a simple game and you’re talking about playing against a single opponent you know well, if you couldn’t predict things a little there’d be something wrong with you.

Although…

This might be why he’s bored by everything. So far, we’ve seen no sign at all that things are as dull and predictable as he says they are, but he responds to everything as if it’s no surprise, even stuff that there’s no way he could have seen coming. What if he’s sort of precog, getting what amounts to an endless stream of spoiler updates from the future? So, he doesn’t exactly know what’ll happen, but by the time it does he’s expecting something like that.

Lena, being magic herself, isn’t covered by this, so even though she’s not objectively doing stuff that’s all that unpredictable, he never has any idea what her response to any trivial thing is, and to him that’s amazing.

She learns he still has the locket and she can’t believe he’s carrying it around and hasn’t buried it yet.

“It doesn’t matter, the thing has a mind of its own. It almost never works. You’ve seen it every time it has.”

Except both of the two people who seem to know about it seems concerned about something unrelated to the visions, which for that matter appear to be totally harmless anyway so who cares. The fact it’s apparently terrifying to the person who knows shit she won’t explain and Pretty Suit Super Magic User is the bigger deal here.

Someone else tells them to be quiet and Lena drops it, and the moment it falls out of the handkerchief another vision happens.

The bushes opened up, and there were two Federals in front of what was left of the house Genevieve’s grandfather had built.

Yeah I’m sure he was totally the one who built it. And the one who harvested all that cotton too.

The eeeevil Union is pouring their silver into a sack, because LOOTERS EVIL EVIL EVIL LOOTERS. Then even more evilly, when she stupidly runs into the burning house one of them drags her back out, incidentally risking his own life to do so. Horrors!

her eyes refocused long enough to see Ethan’s gray wool jacket sprayed with blood. Shot by the very soldiers he had refused to fight against anymore.

Oh my god the soldiers shot another soldier in uniform!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TRULY THE WAR CRIMES OF THE NORTH ARE WITHOUT MEASURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!