Last time on Gemma, Hot Indian Boy sees Gemma in her nightgown. Will anyone discover that Gemma is now a fallen woman? Oh, also she does the vision thing again and sees a weird little girl.
Said little girl says Gemma needs to follow her, and leads her to a tiny cave because Gemma needs to look under the rock in there, Mary says so.
Gemma says she doesn’t know any Mary, and the little girl explains that’s not important, what matters is Mary knows Gemma. And if Gemma wants to find out what’s happening, she has to look.
“Why don’t you get it, then?”
Gemma I’m pretty sure you’re arguing with an incorporeal spirit.
Unfortunately, instead the girl just gives the usual bullshit.
“She says you have to find it yourself. That’s the way of the realms.”
WHY. That’s the sort of thing you always hear from mysterious people who know more than you, and it’s always a shitty copout. “I can’t get it for you because I’m just a vision and not really here!” is a perfectly good reason.
I’m tired and cold and in no mood for a mystery anymore. “Please, I don’t understand. Just tell me what this is all about!”
Then go get the damn book, she told you that’s where the explanation is.
Apparently despite this being a vision, Gemma is actually there? Maybe she means that the girl is a vision, although that’s kind of a weird way of using the term. She finds a diary in a hole hidden behind the rock and then a loose page.
What frightens you?
What makes the hair on your arms rise, your palms sweat, the breath catch in your chest like a
wild thing caged?
…
If you will listen, I will tell you a story—one whose ghosts cannot be banished by the comfort of a roaring fire. I will tell you the story of how we found ourselves in a realm where dreams are formed, destiny is chosen, and magic is as real as your handprint in snow.
This really doesn’t sound like how someone would be writing in a diary.
This isn’t how people write real things at all, in fact. If it’s such a big deal she should get to the point already. Instead, she’s writing this the way someone would write…well, a story.
Anyway, the diarywriter, Mary, claims they unlocked Pandora’s box and destroyed some nice Order in the process. It’s written back in 1871.
Gemma promptly flips out. She starts shouting about how she doesn’t want the power, and if she’s already got the power she doesn’t want to be shown how to use it. This is dumb. We haven’t been told why Gemma hates the power so much, and she hasn’t been acting like she does – she just triggered and then followed a vision to get to this point.
Gemma starts reading the diary from the beginning, and it’s just a typical sixteen year old’s diary. She can’t figure out what the point is and it doesn’t occur to her that maybe the important stuff happens later on, so she gets bored and decides to go to sleep.
She has a dream.
When I dream, it’s of my mother. She pulls my hair back gently in her hands, her warm fingers weaving through it like sunlight, making me drowsy and content. Her arms hold me close, but I slip out of her embrace into the ruin of an ancient temple. Snakes slither along deep green vines grown heavy over an altar. A storm blows in fast, thick ropes of clouds knotting up the sky. Mother’s face looms, tight with fear. Lightning fast, she takes off her necklace, tosses it to me. It hangs in the air, making slow spirals, till it lands in my hands, the corner of the silvery eye cutting my palm. Blood seeps from the cut. When I look up, Mother is shouting to me over the storm. The howling wind makes it hard to hear. But I catch one word above all the others.
Run.
Does this mean anything? Who knows. I’m pretty sick of meaningful dreams.
In my opinion, dreams either need to be directly relevant visions or show something about the character’s emotional state. This one is coyly trying to suggest it might be either, with the result it’s failing at both. The necklace is probably a protective charm but linked to whatever the scary thing is, yes, we can guess as much but Gemma can’t, so the whole blood thing doesn’t make sense as how Gemma would feel and her visions seem literal, not buried in metaphor.
Just foreshadowing for the sake of it is bad writing, in the same way starting off your story with a cryptic prophesy is. We get it, you know how the story’s going to do and can drop clues! That doesn’t mean you’re actually clever.
That ends the chapter. In the next one, Gemma wakes up to see Ann already up and dressed. Ann, continuing to be a surprisingly accommodating person, says she’s already cleaned up all the mud Gemma tracked in. Although if it was a lot, the housekeeper or someone might notice the footprints leading right to the door.
Anyway, Gemma goes to get dressed and finds she can’t put on the corset by herself. …how did Ann get dressed, then?
She pulls hard on the laces, pushing the air out of my lungs till I think my ribs will break. “A bit looser, please,” I squeak. She obliges, and I’m now only uncomfortable instead of crippled.
As that’s not actually how you’re supposed to wear the corset, perhaps Ann is less accommodating and more passive-aggressive enough to put Rose to shame.
Ann says Gemma shouldn’t wander around, and Gemma thinks that Ann knows she wasn’t alone. Considering she probably woke up Ann last night, yeah, it’s likely. But she doesn’t want to admit it.
She might think it bonds us together as misfits, and I’m an oddity of one, my strangeness too complicated to explain or share.
Oookay.
Also, Ann’s mutilated her wrist but quickly says it was an accident. Since this is the time before PSAs about cutting, Gemma just lets it go. Then Ann starts indirectly saying she’s not pretty, and Gemma doesn’t really argue, so Ann wanders off with Gemma thinks about how she totally screwed that up and will she ever make a friend here?
She goes down and eats breakfast, which is cold and icky, then her first class has, as Ann warned, the alpha wolves.
One of the beta girls asks how she got out and Gemma says she has hidden powers. Then she informs Felicity that she did manage to get the item.
Felicity is all attention. “Really? Where do you have it hidden?”
“Oh, I didn’t think it wise to hide it. Might not be able to find it again,” I say, cheerily. “It’s sitting in plain view on your chair in the great hall
Eh.
Gemma’s character is rapidly turning into just Spunky Girl With A Spine. What’s the point of doing this? Okay, so she’s gotten back at the alpha wolves for their prank by escalating things, surely she understands that this just means they’ll escalate further in retaliation?
I’m also not seeing how this is a big deal. As Gemma just demonstrated, there’s nothing stopping one kid from putting something in another’s chair. Why not “Oh, I brought it to show you but you weren’t in your room so I left it there, hope that’s okay.” That’s a much better way of framing her.
She continues on her way to sit by Ann, who guesses that Gemma was locked in the church. Apparently they’ve done that a lot. Huh, and here I thought it was a spur of the moment prank. I am disappoint, alpha wolves.
The French teacher arrives. Like all adults at the place, she is described as ugly. Gemma then realizes the kids who’ve been taking French for years are able to speak French and she can’t. You just realized this might be an issue?
Anyway, the teacher keeps asking her questions despite it being obvious Gemma can’t speak a word of the language and getting steadily more annoyed, instead of realizing it within a few minutes.
After class the teacher tells Gemma her grasp of the language is terrible, apparently still not realizing the correct adjective is “nonexistent”.
You will have to work very hard to stay in this class with the other girls your age. If I don’t see improvement, I will be forced to demote you to the lower classes.
Why didn’t they do that from the start? Look, they know she’s from the uncivilized jungle that is India, they should have triple checked that she even speaks English..And having discovered that her education is terrible, they should stick her into the class for people who can’t speak French instead of assuming she’ll somehow gain several years of knowledge if they just tell her it’s annoying she can’t speak French.
Also, she’s told that Felicity’s great at it and she should ask her for help.
More classes happen and we find out that Ann is actually a talented singer. Gemma compliments her on this, which was nice of her. All of this is dead boring, though. Shadow thing should appear or something.
A week passes of Gemma being a social outcast. I approve, book. It’s important to have time passing. The entire events of the Summoning took about one week, and when I could stop hating how nothing was happening I hated how too much of that nothing was getting crammed into such a tiny space.
There is one message from Kartik. The night after I discover the diary, I find an old letter from Father pinned to my bed with a small blade. The letter, rambling and sloppy, had hurt to read, and so I had stuffed it into my desk drawer, hidden away. Or so I thought. Seeing it on my bed, slashed, with the words you have been warned scrawled across Father’s signature chills me to the bone.
So I guess Hot Indian Boy can tell she had another vision or something? I dunno.
But I find I can’t close off my mind without closing off the rest of me. Fear has me retreating inside myself, detached from everything, as useless as the scorched East Wing upstairs.
Better yet, this isn’t a description of why Gemma promptly stops closing herself off. Instead, it’s a lead-in for the next scene, where Gemma has done exactly that and is pretty out of it.
Well, her narration is still pretty lively, so this isn’t handled all that well, but points for the attempt.
Miss Moore wants to know what we think about art. She means to have us talk and risk giving our opinions instead of making painstaking copies of cheery fruit. This throws the sheep into complete confusion.
Okay, unless Moore was just hired the other girls should be familiar with her teaching style. Also, remember, Gemma has never been to a school like this before. Why does she think she knows what an art class is like?
In fact, generally, Gemma is acting like a kid who’s just switched schools. Her actions don’t seem obviously off because they’re falling into a very familiar pattern, but they don’t make any sense given that she shouldn’t fit that pattern.
Anyway today they’re talking about a picture based on a poem about a woman who can’t leave her tower or she’ll die and she does leave and die because she’s in love with a knight.
“But she’s doomed by a curse, isn’t she?” Ann says. “It’s not love. It’s beyond her control. If she leaves the tower, she will die.”
“And yet she doesn’t die when she leaves the tower. She dies on the river. Interesting, isn’t it?
I don’t have any idea because I’ve never read the poem. I would really love to read some litcrit stuff on it, because how is that not fascinating, but you really have to finish the explanation, you can’t just throw out questions and expect it to have meaning when I don’t know the original topic.
“I think that the lady dies not because she leaves the tower for the outside world, but because she lets herself float through that world, pulled by the current after a dream.”
…and now that I’ve read the wiki page I don’t see how this is a valid reading, and it still fails on the interesting litcrit level because the teacher’s not explaining why she thinks this, and even just from the book itself I’m left with the sense she’s just saying it for the sake of it. It’s just hamhanded author metaphor. I mean, it’s not on the level of Twilight’s classic books fuckery, but it’s not good either.
Anyway then Ann gets really upset about how it doesn’t matter what the woman does, she’s going to die, they won’t let her win! The teacher, who are probably used to her having meltdowns, calms her down, only for Pippa to suddenly flip out too.
Pippa is suddenly agitated. “But people can be cursed, can’t they? They could have something, an
affliction, that’s beyond their control. Couldn’t they?”
Huh. I look forward to learning what that’s about.
Moore, being a pretty nice teacher, continues to talk in a gentle, let’s not melt down into hysterics and start tearing at our hair voice.
Felicity demands to know if Moore believes in curses. Moore tells them they all get a carriage!
Okay, no, but she says that next week they can go on a field trip which is practically the same thing.
and explore the old caves, where there are some truly astonishing primitive drawings. They can tell you far more about art than I can.”
Huh, I’m curious what actual Victorian thought on cave paintings was. I somehow feel like “good example of art” is pushing things.
Anyway she then lets the now cheerful and distracted kids out and says if anyone asks their class assignment is to examine the natural world.
Gemma decides to rush off and read the diary again, despite deciding it was stupid and boring before. This leads to her running full speed into the housekeeper.
“Carrying on in that way, galloping like a stallion about to meet the gelder’s knife! Now, I ask you, is that any way for a proper lady to conduct ’erself? Hmm? Now wot would Missus Nightwing say if she was to see you makin’ such a spectacle o’ yerself?”
I think Nightwing might have more issues with you talking about cutting a horse’s balls off. So this is the standard humorously crude and uneducated lower-class woman. As her phonic accent shows, she doesn’t even know how to talk properly.
Suddenly, the woman notices Gemma has really green eyes and gets creeped out, although she doesn’t explain why. So either the green eyes are a sign of crazy satanic powers, or it’s just that it’s reminding the woman of Gemma’s mom and her crazy satanic powers. It’s not clear how old she is, maybe she was around for that.
We’re now about a fourth of the way into the book. Gemma’s personality still hasn’t stabilized and I’m expecting it’ll get worse rather than better. Oh well. The writing style is quite readable and enough is going on it’s a good distraction. I’m increasingly sure that, page of thanks or no, this book is not at all historically accurate, but my Victorian knowledge is lacking and I’m not going to blindly factcheck every sentence or I’ll never finish.
So far, we’ve had casual racism and no sexism – or, well, ridiculous and called-out strawman sexism. I’m sort of expecting the racism aspect to get worse, since the Gypsies running around seem like they’ll be a plot point, but I can’t really say about the sexism. The author really doesn’t seem like she’s got a great grasp of the issue, but the setting is sexless enough that it’s possible we’ll avoid her touching anything more nuanced than how wrong it is men think women aren’t their equals.