So.

I don’t think I can really unpack the issue of how to deal with the whole Civil War backdrop and not be horrible. I’m sure it’s possible, but I mean – we’ve got bloodlines of functionally separate people whose blood can’t mingle with the commoners and who are superior in every way, and a born-evil branch to boot. You want that shit as far as away from any real-life race issues as possible.

Given the whole book was pointless because the real conflict was introduced in Ch32 and resolved in Ch33, let’s just go through what was introduced.

First off, we have a kid having unexplained dreams with unexplained physical remnants left behind, which he casually mentions while bitching about how boring his town is, and proceeds to ignore or dismiss nearly every other weird thing to happen in the course of the book. Go Eerie Indiana and Sunnydale with this – the place is freaky and no one notices. That’s a setting that can hold up for just about any plot. Make it a romance comedy where his girlfriend is constantly doing weird suspicious things and he doesn’t notice, instead paying normal teenage attention to ordinary relationship stuff. Make it a dark, disturbing tale as he obsesses about finding out about his mother’s death with all the insanity in the background, making us wonder if really, she was killed by the powers at work and he’ll never learn the truth because he can’t seem to notice them.

(Why the fuck do we never even find out what happened to his mother? Why is that like the E-plot of this, especially when it’s not like any of the other plots turned out to matter?)

Next there’s what the book was billed as, supernatural romance, where naturally it turns out the boy has some super special power anyway, because boys have to be special, always.

True genderflipped supernatural romance must be possible, but the only one I can think of is in Empowered. Empowered is the story of a superhero that, uh, grew out of her creator getting a bunch of commissions for superheroines in distress, so she has a costume that gives her superpowers but loses power as it gets ripped, which it does easily. It’s a lot better than it sounds, okay?

Anyway, early on she gets a boyfriend, who’s a squishy human. He is pretty tough…for a human, she still has to save him when there’s trouble. We even learn later on that he’s got some pretty good fighting knowledge of his own, so much that he manages to serve a vital support role protecting people while she runs off to defeat the actual villain – he’s good, but she’s the main character here. His super important plot role is, instead, emotional support, since that’s what she really needs.

And certainly, real emotional support would’ve been helpful here. We could play up the issue of choice – Lena’s mental state at sixteen will determine the rest of her life. A good boyfriend will support her, remind her things aren’t so bad/will get better, fight back with her against the unfairness of school. A bad boyfriend might isolate her, encourage her vengefulness and sense she’s different, fail to do anything to protect her from the bullying…basically, most of what actually went down in this book.

We could also go the more traditional route and just make him the observer into weirdness. He doesn’t serve any particularly important role in the plot, he’s just there because someone major loves him. There’s a big magic system and complex social structure for the casters with ancient history and agreements and bindings to do stuff left and right, and he’s there for exposition purposes and maybe to provide a more normal viewpoint at times.

And that’s about the limit of what Emothan’s good for.

Now, we do have some interesting stuff just from the caster side.

Let’s say we have Link, who seems a pretty decent guy, getting to know Lena and also her cousin, and so he’s pulled between the two while their whole dark/light drama is playing out. The authors here and apparently all authors these days really likes no one explaining anything, so this would be well suited to a plot about secrets and lies. Both Lena and Ridley are not being ridiculously obvious about their magic, and so he’s only very slowly drawn in, discovering more and more about the divide between Ridley and her family and growing tension about which side Lena will end up on.

Or let’s say we have Ridley (a main character who’s actually meant to be evil! That would be super awesome) or a version of Lena that doesn’t suck, and we focus on the caster family. I said before there’s a clear mental illness parallel, only these people don’t die or end up institutionalized, they’re still around, still sane, just evil. How do you handle growing up with half your relatives “evil” and the possibility that the kids you’re friends with now and you yourself might turn? How do you handle going evil yourself, and what does that even mean? How do you handle family relationships? There’s clearly enough of a bond between the two sides that they don’t seem to harm each other. Certainly the dark ones still care about the light ones, and I see no reason why the same wouldn’t be true the other way around.

Maybe they have a sort of twisted symbiotic relationship, with the light side keeping dark at arm’s length but still relying on them to deal with any threats to the family. This would also explain why the ethics of the family as a whole seem so poor – the “good” casters are used to running on technical goodness. Working off how the light side seems just as unnatural as the dark one, maybe the light side casters can’t really function on their own – they can’t really defend themselves and have to rely on protective dark casters when push comes to shove. They are the badly played paladin in the party who always wanders out of the room before the rest of the party starts torturing orcs to find out where the last few copper pieces are.

Both sides being pretty bad choices also gives Lena a much better reason for her pre-birthday breakdowns. Your mind getting rewritten to be half a person either way means that she’s going to cease to be really her at sixteen, even if she goes light.

And…urg, fine, let’s try gingerly touching the Civil War business.

There’s a reason why it tends to be the Confederates who are aligned with the evil forces, and it’s not just because they were the losing side. A system that oppresses most people so a tiny handful can live lives of luxury is going to be pretty appealing to the individually powerful, as they can be sure they’re on top. A system that involves literally owning people is going to be even better, since you don’t even need to worry about getting in trouble if you need some human sacrifices to your dark gods.

In this case, the stuff that happens is all about bad deeds coming home to roost. The Duchannes are living the good life on the backs of their slaves, content in the knowledge that as the ruling class, no one would dare speak against them. They’re not a separate species, just people with extra powers, and they can marry just fine with mortals, they were just too racist to want to dilute their blood. Some of the very best wealthy slave-owning mortals might be good enough for their sons and daughters, but not someone like Ethan, who was entirely too dark in color. I think specifically he’d be best as the child of some plantation owner’s freed byblow, since it’s always good to remind everyone that totally happened and southern talk about racial purity is a sick, sick joke.

Ethan runs off to join the Union, because seriously what else would he do, but when they start marching through South Carolina, he takes off to run ahead of them, afraid of Genevieve getting hurt in the crossfire. Sherman’s march will win the war with or without him, and what better time than now to take off with Genevieve anyway?

Her dad shoots him.

We haven’t had kinslaying yet, not properly with the idea this is a particular sin, and I like magic following rules that aren’t necessarily moral but merely in the same general area. Genevieve kills her dad for this before killing herself trying to resurrect Ethan. It’s the combination of both acts that curses her line to be one way or the other. It also means the curse does not proceed directly from her kids, avoiding the question of why the fuck would you have kids after that. (In fact, maybe she fucks up all casters by doing this – it’s not like magic seems to have any clear limits, and the extinction of all magic users anywhere is a lot more to ask then telling one line of people to stop having kids and maybe consider adoption or something instead.) The story of the locket then becomes relevant because until this point, no one knows why they’re cursed exactly.

Lightsiders are unable to harm others and given to self-sacrifice. Darksiders are vengeful and given to sudden murder. It’s generally agreed to keep the darksiders away from the kids because they can be dangerous, but it’s not universally enforced, and among adults, they keep just enough distance for plausible deniability – a dark caster killing people around the light caster makes them feel all guilty, so they do it in the town next door instead. That’s what we actually see in the book, so why not codify it? Ridley hanging around almost-sixteen Lena is therefore just borderline – she’s not supposed to, but the protections are really for the younger kids and Lena will soon be in the adults camp, either the same as Ridley or reliant on her to clean up the messes.

(While we’re here, can we get rid of those terms? Full and half moon, maybe. Or maybe just flip the terms so that light=fullmoon=evil powers. Or call them blue and orange, just anything else really.)

Ethan is their redemption, potentially – if the second star-crossed lovers plays out better than the first, the curse can be broken and they can stop being half-functional. But getting back to the badly played paladin thing, being light and dark has little to do with if you’re a dick, and the rest of her family is not too thrilled by the idea of their little fifteen year old pureblood baby taking up with one of those people. The “good” side just have to have some passive in their aggressive. This serves as a perfect setup to actually discuss the racial politics of the south, because now the casters are an exaggerated version of an existing real life thing rather than something else entirely that’s replacing actual racial tension so we can talk about how unfair it is to white men.

(Even the version of the story where Ethan matters works fine with Ridley as our protagonist – in that case, she’d be the good outsider viewpoint, and can illustrate changing times and how dark doesn’t just mean evil – she’s part of a generation that doesn’t give a damn about miscegenation and totally sincere in her approval of Lena’s boyfriend.)

Regardless of all of this, magic is not done by saying some dumb rhyme. Either it’s done the way I outlined a few chapters ago, with actual objects and metaphor and stuff, or it’s in some caster-only language that Lena isn’t very familiar with – perhaps they teach the kids only after they turn sixteen – or, since god knows it didn’t matter, there just are no spells and it’s just more will-based magic as made up the vast, vast majority of the magic we saw here.

Also, since Lena being the most special of the special doesn’t seem to have mattered, let’s just take that out too. All her being a “natural” accomplished was making her actual abilities vague. Her powers are she makes storms, there we go, done.

There’s probably more that could be said here but god, what’s the point? This was perhaps the most empty book I’ve done. It has the sort of nonsense magic system usually restricted to fanfic, and at least there the authors usually have the decency to have stuff actually happening. Conclusion posts are supposed to build off ideas from the story and this story would make a swamp look like bedrock. There are scattered elements that you could swipe and do something useful, because people haven’t yet figured out how to write a book without saying anything at all, but they’re all just bobbing around in the muck without any connection to each other.

In conclusion, here are bad photos of my new cat reconsidering his life choices that look spooky because the camera settings were wrong.

If I cared, I would try to tie this metaphorically into the book as a whole but fuck that, here’s my new cat looking blurry, everyone!