Last time on Gemma, Gemma decided that she didn’t care what everyone else said.

This time on Gemma, she’s thinking about what everyone else said. I think it’s to try to make her look more reasonable, as if she’s really giving thought to the fact she’s told not to do all this. But she isn’t actually considering it, she’s just mentioning it then dismissing it as if the giving thought step happened.

The mini-Order meets and Gemma tells them absolutely everything except the part where she almost had dream sex with Kartik, and Felicity’s response is LET’S DO IT. Alpha wolves know no fear.

I catch sight of a symbol I’ve never noticed before at the very bottom of a cave wall. It’s partially defaced, but some of it is still visible. A woman and a swan. At first glance, it seems as if she’s being attacked by the great white bird, but on closer inspection, it seems as if the woman and the swan are joined together as one. A great mythical creature. A woman prepared to fly, even if she has to lose her legs to do it.

Or she’s getting raped by Zeus.

I don’t know how anyone can write “a picture of a woman attacked by a swan” on a wall full of goddesses no less and not think of Zeus. If it’s supposed to be an uplifting message, use a different animal. Right now, Gemma either has completely misunderstood, or the message is that women get power by fucking it out of a male god. Which does fit the themes so far, but I doubt the author means to admit that.

On that note, they join hands and they concentrate on the door of light. And it appears, but only Gemma can touch it, and her necklace glows and there’s the same symbol on the door and sueity sue sue.

The door leads to the garden, which is impossibly perfect and lovely. The girls each smell different comforting things from their memories, and Gemma thinks she sees a place that reminds her of her home in India, plus there’s a rosewater smell. She immediately ditches the rest of them to go see her mom. Why don’t they follow? Because we’re back to the first plot setup where it’s Gemma vs mysterious visions, I guess.

This time her mother is actually waiting for her and we get a relatively straightforward explanation of things.

“A world between worlds. A place where all things are possible.” Mother takes a seat. She blows a dandelion. A blizzard of white fluff spreads out on the breeze. “It’s where the Order came to reflect, to hone their magic and themselves, to come through the fire and be made new. Everyone comes here from time to time—in dreams, when ideas are born.” She pauses. “In death.”
…
When you were five, a woman came to me. One of the Order. She told me everything. That you were special—the promised girl who could restore the magic of these realms and bring the Order back
to power.

And this is why her mother wouldn’t let her go to London. Because apparently distance makes a difference. I guess that explains why an Indian boy would be namedropping nothing by guys like King Arthur, there really are no other magic places or groups in the rest of the world.

But. Her mom is saying here that she wasn’t even part of the Order – she learned about this afterward. But she seems to know all sorts of stuff about actually using the power, which she can’t have learned later on because the realms would have been closed for a decade by then. Unless being dead lets you understand how the place works, I guess.

So then Gemma asks about the whole suicide thing.

If it had taken me alive, I would be lost, a dark thing too.”
“What about Amar?”
Mother’s mouth goes tight. “He was my guardian. He gave his life for me. There was nothing I could do to save him.”

Well.

So the well-spoken, intelligent guy was just her servant like the rest of the Indians. And by “nothing I could do” she means, of course, “nothing I could do besides kill myself once I knew it’d be coming for me instead of waiting an extra half hour, or, failing that, decide to take my chances instead of damning someone else.”

“Let’s not worry about that now, shall we?” Mother says

…

So, is she really Gemma’s mom? She’s just said something awful, but then again, we don’t know anything about Gemma’s mother that’d contradict her being that sort of person. All we know is that she definitely cared a lot about Gemma. And both her mom and a thing taking her mom’s shape to trick her would act like they cared about her, there isn’t any easy way to tell.

Anyway, her mom tells her that other members of the Order are still around.

When the realms were closed, they all went into hiding. Some have forgotten what they know. Others have turned their backs on it. But some are still faithful, waiting for the day the realms will open and the magic can be theirs again.

You know…does it matter?

I mean, what were they doing with this magic? From what we’re hearing it’s a huge deal, but let’s consider this for a moment.

In the current setting of the book, women have extremely little power. Twenty years ago when the realms closed, women had extremely little power, and so on back through the ages. This is another part of the problem of just blindly shouting about female empowerment, if you insist women have special magical feminine powers, you really have to consider how things should look if that’s true.

I read a scifi book, the title of which sadly escapes me, where after an apocalypse, the survivors ended up enslaving women and treating them as subhuman to the point that girls were raised in communal pits. The book had a lot of issues, but it had some good points as well. The women were believed to have supernatural powers and be extremely dangerous, justifying why they have to be constantly oppressed. The female character recounts one of the cults that form among slaves, where the women try to use those powers to harm their owners. One of them ends up dying because she walks off the edge of a building thinking she can stand on moonlight. The moral, the character explains, is that believing those things is just another trap.

And even if we want to ignore all that, the book itself isn’t even trying. Consider what actually happened twenty years ago: in the realms, a cataclysm locked the realms away and cut off every magic user (in the world?) from the power. In the real world, three people died in a fire.

Gemma wants to know if this place is real, which honestly, pretty non sequitor, and then why no one else remembers the place if everyone comes here, and apparently only going through the door lets you remember it.

At this point Gemma says she brought her friends, and her mom is amazed because apparently that takes a ton of power, even though she already knows Gemma had a ton of power, so it’s really just there so the book can emphasize that Gemma really is super special. But her mom asks if she trusts them.

“Sarah and Mary were friends. And they betrayed each other.”

Huh. And it’s not that Sarah betrayed her, they both did?

Gemma asks where they are and why she can’t find them, and her mother says they don’t exist any longer.

“What do you mean? What happened to them?”
“Let’s not waste time discussing the past,” Mother says dismissively. She gives me a smile. “I just want to look at you. My goodness, you’re already becoming a lady.”

BAD BAD BAD.

We can guess that Sarah is likely “Circe”, and that one of them must be it. But this means something weird happened with them both. Even getting dragged to the Winterland didn’t produce the statement that the person no longer exists. And at the same time, her mother changes the subject to distract Gemma, who stupidly falls for it.

So, I’m guessing her mom was one of the girls? I’m not really sure how, since it seems like it’d be pretty hard to get married if you had to pretend to be someone else, since upper-class marriage is all about lineage, and with the realms closed she shouldn’t have been able to use magic to accomplish that. But I just really don’t buy the idea she was uninvolved. Especially when she’s avoiding subjects that she has no reason to avoid if she learned about this secondhand. Or it could still be something pretending to be her mom.

Gemma tries to eat a blackberry and is warned that they’re not for the living and if you eat them you’ll be stuck forever. Well fuck, her friends don’t know that. But Gemma doesn’t bother to go warn them.

Mother glances at the little girl—the one from my visions. She’s hiding behind a tree.
“Who is that?” I ask.
“My helper,” Mother says.

Oh god.

We last saw the little kid in Gemma’s dream:

I’m standing, alone, at the top, in front of the closed doors to the East Wing. The air is whispering a lullaby to me . . .Come to us, come to us, come to us . Push open the door with the palm of my hand. It’s no longer a scorched ruin. The room is alive with light, golden walls and gleaming floors. My mother is gone.
Instead, I see the little girl huddled over her doll.
Her eyes are large and unblinking. “They promised me my dolly.”

Whatever the kid is, it isn’t something good. She looks filthy and ill-treated, she acts like she’s been hollowed out, she’s found in a place connected to the evil spirit, and she says she was lured. She’s some sort of slave spirit.

Gemma’s mother doesn’t know what the girl’s name is and looks pained by the question, then tells Gemma it’s time to go. She claims this is because it isn’t safe to stay long in the garden, though who knows if that’s actually true. It’s best Gemma gets moving, though, since she still hasn’t warned her friends that they’ll be trapped if they eat any of the supernaturally perfect fruit.

Anyway, Gemma goes back to her friends to where they’re still having fun, and is just in time to tell Pippa not to eat any berries.

“If you eat them, you have to stay here forever.”
“No wonder they look so tempting,” she says.
I hold out my hand. Reluctantly

Oh dear. And Pippa’s been seduced by the place. So maybe her “find true love” wish isn’t what’ll somehow do her in but the garden.

Anyway, the next chapter has the girls all on cloud nine after the experience and barely paying attention in class.

Cecily is quite put out. “The old Pip and Fee wouldn’t have kept secrets from us.”
“But those old girls are gone.” Felicity gives a radiant smile. “They are dead and buried. We are new girls for a new world.”
And with that we push past them, leaving them behind us in the hall like so much dust floating slowly down to earth.

I’m not sure if this is meant to be ominous, as the author has been consistently disdainful of the other girls. It really doesn’t sound good to me, though.

In art class, they complain about having to paint a still life and when Moore asks what’s up they repeat the whole specialer than thou thing. Also, Felicity bites the apple. She sure does like apples.

Miss Moore claps her hands together. “We could do with something new. I am overthrown. They are your canvases for the hour, ladies. Do as you will.”

Immediately Cecily starts complaining that she wants something nice to show her parents. See what I mean? Moore didn’t say that she was taking her fruit and going home, there’s no reason to assume they can’t do the original lesson if they want, so this whole bit is only there to accuse them of being unimaginative boring girls who don’t want to be special empowered goddesses like the alpha wolf pack.

Felicity, meanwhile decides she doesn’t want to do any pictures at all, she wants to use clay.

At the end of class Gemma, despite her original complaints, has done a not particularly good apple. She explains the problem is she’s trying to make it shiny but adding more light paint doesn’t work, so her teacher shows her a stroke of dark can help bring out the brightness of the rest.

“Why couldn’t Gemma simply add the white to make the apple shine?” Pippa asks.
“Because you don’t notice the light without a bit of shadow. Everything has both dark and light. You have to play with it till you get it exactly right.”

Can we get symbolism from somewhere other than the designated symbolism class?

One of the other girls former popular girls is trying the same technique.

it’s making her fruit look bruised and ugly. But I’m not going to tell her that.

Gemma’s constant cattiness is making her personality look pretty ugly as well.

Anyway her apple painting is called “The Choice” and she stumbles through an explanation that it’s about choosing something more.

Cecily shakes her head. “Well, it’s not a very accurate name. Eve didn’t choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent.”
“Yes,” I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. “But . . . she didn’t have to take a bite. She chose to.”

Here’s why you should never invoke this damn story.

The modern conception of the story of Adam and Eve is a picture-book version, which has a number of differences from what the original version said. So when you bring it up, it’s impossible to tell if you meant the modern incorrect version or the original. This strips out any possible nuance there is and leaves only “doing something when there are bad consequences”.

So with that in mind, what the fuck is being said here? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We can’t tell if Gemma’s statement about choice is a sign she’s deluded or an accurate interpretation, which in turn makes it useless as foreshadowing.

Cecily says that she’d stay in paradise, and Moore suddenly starts talking about how that’s also a choice, and there are choices everywhere and There are no safe choices, Miss Temple. Only other choices. Pippa says her mom says girls aren’t supposed to have lots of choices, that’s what husbands are for, and Moore says all choices have consequences. WE GET IT YOU ARE WISE AND FEMINIST AND SHIT. Then Felicity takes another bite out of the apple and thank god everyone drops the subject.

Then Gemma has to ruin it and bring it up again, because she’s wondering about the choice the two girls made and her own choice to run away that day in the market, because apparently they’re all the same level of “choice” to the author. She asks what if you make the wrong choice and is told then you have to fix it. She asks what if you can’t.

There’s a sad sympathy in Miss Moore’s catlike eyes as she regards my painting again. She paints the thinnest sliver of shadow along the bottom of the apple, bringing it fully to life.
“Then you must find a way to live with it.”

You’re trying too hard, book.

In other news.

I think I’m going to do these double polls more. I was expecting the want/don’t want to be similar, but it seems people are more likely to not want something than they are to want it.

Anyway, over half of you either want or have come to peace with the fact we’re doing BW next, and by next I mean probably interrupting Gemma unless I have enough time to keep that going while I play BW.

I have no real opinion on my starter, so tell me what to pick.