Last chapter, it was the second to last chapter. And now we’re finally going to finish.
They run for a long time. Rhine makes a clumsy reference to Dante’s Inferno which was some hell place because remember, this book is inexplicably secular, about the adulterous lovers trapped in the cyclone. Only she didn’t even have a chance to commit the adultery, which she feels is extra unfair.
I can’t understand why this road is so long. In the limousine it was only minutes that we were on it
Rhine is stupid and doesn’t understand cars go faster than people, despite seeming to be familiar with riding in them before now.
Suddenly she realizes they reached the city after all!
The lights and buildings all reveal themselves as though a curtain has just been parted for us.
Or the author decided that you could suddenly see them.
They see a movie theater.
He says, “What’s a zombie?”
“I don’t know. We could find out, though. We can do anything we want.”
How the fuck does Rhine not know.
They go in and Rhine realizes she has no money. It didn’t occur to her to try to make off with any of the various incredibly valuable things, like putting on one of her diamond-encrusted dresses, because as established Rhine is a useless waste of space. The author doesn’t give a damn anyway, they just manage to sneak in with the crowd without anyone asking for their ticket, even though previously things are so dire even stores rarely have customers.
“This is what Manhattan is like,” I whisper to him.
“People crawl out of their graves in Manhattan?”
“No. They pay to see movies like this.”
Bullshit, if they did you’d know what zombies were.
They nap. Rhine isn’t bothered by the screaming because she knows it’s fake, in complete defiance of how the human brain works. But it’s not like her brain works properly at any other point so whatever.
Rhine suddenly decides that now she’s not the guy’s wife, or maybe she never was, not that this stopped her from calling him her husband the whole book. She tells winning love interest her original last name, and he says he doesn’t have one despite the fact that’s not how last names work, you still get one even if they don’t know your parent’s surname, and then they make out.
Rhine admits she hasn’t a clue what she’s doing. She can’t even call their house becaus they don’t have a phone. Her plan is to find a pay phone, because apparently those still exist, and then call the factory he worked at.
There’s a good chance he’s still there.
After a year? When from what you said you guys changed jobs all the time? But I guess pointing out how Rhine’s fucked up by staying so long before actually trying to escape would be reminding us of the fact the author can’t write.
Rhine wonders when the police will come to chase them down. So, it’s only taken the whole book but finally we’ve actually learned the police are in on this.
How the fuck does society even function when women are chattel? I mean, how is Rhine getting employment when at any moment a random supervisor can announce she’s now his slave and the police will hunt her down if she runs away? Why don’t the police just walk into people’s homes and take the girls instead of people having to sneak in? Why didn’t they get in trouble for killing that guy trying to steal Rhine if he had every legal right to do so?
Cecily. She sent that attendant out to help us last night. I didn’t trust it.
If you thought the book would stop hating Cecily just because she’s no longer even around, you’re wrong. Rhine boggles at the idea of Cecily helping even though she also says she knows Cecily was horrified to realize her attempt to help had gotten Jenna killed. Rhine then moves on to planning her next move because she doesn’t give a fuck about Cecily beyond the fact that everything is Cecily’s fault. Cecily’s intentions don’t matter.
Anyway, the brilliant plan is just to steal a boat, which luckily is accomplished by just untying it because apparently no one else in the world has figured out that you can steal boats.
Rhine goes on for a bit about how he’s so competent and able to steer the boat, while she’s worse than useless and actually makes it worse and has to go sit quietly and not touch anything.
Gabriel’s brilliant capable steering is, of course, to just head away from the shore and ensure they immediately get lost.
Maybe, I think, we’ll end up on the beach Deirdre’s father painted. Maybe we’ll touch real starfish that we can hold in our hands, that don’t fall right through our grasp. Either way we’ll have to find a shore somewhere.
Actually, no, dumbfucks, the universe is not obligated to lead you back to the shore, it is totally fucking capable of letting you drift around in the ocean until you die.
We’ll have to stop and ask for directions to Manhattan
NORTH
HOW FUCKING HARD IS NORTH
Gabriel puts his arm around me, and I rest my hand on his, feeling the sturdy resistance of the steering wheel.
“Look,” he says in my ear.
In the distance I see a lighthouse. The light washes over us and continues on its rotation. This time, I don’t know where the light will guide us.
LIGHTHOUSES MARK WHERE THERE’S GROUND YOU FUCKING
No, never mind, aim right for it. Full speed.
It’s like the author went, “Oh, whoops, I guess this has to end somehow.”
She did manage to ensure I wouldn’t complain about that. Anything to end it.
Whoo! You’re done! Big round of applause! :D :D
My thoughts:
1. Did Gabriel kind of disappear for like half the book? What makes him so awesome anyway? What are his definable traits?
2. Rhine seems to be almost as much of a blank slate.
3. I hate how much of a double standard was applied to Cecily.
4. Jenna should have been the main character. She was kinder and more interesting.
5. The rape-apology in this is absolutely disgusting.
6. This author needs to go die somewhere. If no death can be arranged, she needs to go meet rape and/or kidnapping victims to see how unfun it is.
Unfortunately, I have this strange urge to locate a copy of Wither, just so I can read it in its horrible entirety. It seems like one of those bad books that are so awful they need to be read to be believed.
Gabriel is bigger and more muscular than Linden. Also, he has blue eyes
while Linden has green…I think, maybe it’s the other way around.
If you wish to enjoy the unfiltered thing, Wither can be freely read in
various quantities across the internet, ranging from Amazon on.
I think I’ll buy a copy so I can annotate it, but then I’ll be supporting the author. Hmm, what a quandary…
Buy it secondhand.
You could do what Laura said, or you could find a free PDF and print yourself a carpet book. With something like the Hunger Games or even Twilight I would say just go ahead and buy it, but this is so far beyond that. The author is a complete monster. In a perfect world, it would actually cost her money for people to read her book.
The author makes me wish all that stuff about internet piracy being like stealing a car was real. Because just not increasing her spoils is nowhere near what should happen.
Find a library copy, and annotate it in the building without ever checking it out so they won’t know who’s doing it.
You finished! Hopefully with your mind intact. *hands you internet champagne*
I have the felling that in the sequel we will discover that Cecily is to be blamed by the magic virus and the destruction of every other landmass
Someone will say that she needs to push the button to fix those problems, but it will turn out the button makes it happen in the past. Then Rhine will yell at her for deliberately ruining everyone’s life.
The only thing I can possibly think of, for the wife legality scenario, is that it’s some sort of wife-stealing tradition, like some cultures employ. Maybe one where, if you can steal a woman long enough to put her through a wedding ritual and take her virginity, she’s yours, and at most maybe you’ll have to pay her parents a few coins for the inconvenience. (Except minus that last part, obviously.)
But the book was very careful on making sure Linden never consummated with Rhine, which means he wouldn’t have followed through on completing the wife-stealing ritual, and she shouldn’t be worrying about police coming after her. Maybe Linden/Vaughn would have told the police he had, after a year of this, though? That’s all I can come up with. It’s a stretch, I know.
And geesh, is that really how the book finishes? They see a lighthouse, and then it just cuts out, like the Sopranos?
The problem is, if that’s the idea the weddings should be televised and Rhine should be acting like the virginity thing is part of an actual timetable for escape.
It’s more like if in the Sopranos they started a digression about how the purpose of tables was to hold up the ceiling. These dumb assholes seem to think a lighthouse is there to shine a light on something far away so you can see it.
Judging by these reviews, I feel like this book is worse than Twilight. Stylistically it’s better (only judging by the excerpts I’ve seen) but the content just reaches new levels of sheer awful. IIRC Twilight didn’t have rape (well, apart from the IMPRINTING AAAUUUUUGRGH) and it didn’t blame kidnapped thirteen year old orphans for their rape, impregnation and imprisonment. Rhine seems even worse than Bella and that takes doing. Also, Twilight didn’t blow up the rest of the world for the lulz.
Or maybe it’s because Twilight is old news and I didn’t think anything else could sink that low. Whatever it is…Farla, congratulations, and I hope you recover from this atrocity. Finally, THIS BOOK IS FUCKING AWFUL HOW CAN SOMEONE WRITE THIS
RE: Twilight: I felt the same way and wondering the same thing. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve all become desensitized to Twilight or because this is so much worse. I hesitate to say the latter, because if you read the scene where Jacob date rapes Bella in the woods, it’s one of the most disturbing things ever… but even if the book demonizes Bella for it (which it doesn’t usually), you can’t get over that Bella is a really shitty person, whereas Cecily is just a poor kid. The overall effect of Wither is worse, I think, because Bella is so hateable.
Yeah, I was going to say that part of the problem was that part of it is that Wither is a more grounded and… not necessarily realistic, but at least naturalistic portrayal of abuse. But then I remember that. It’s more like Twilight straddles the spectrum. On the one hand, the imprinting thing is magicalized and downright bizarre to the point that you can sometimes disassociate it from real-world child grooming long enough to laugh at the absurdity of Jacob being attracted to Bella because one of her ova is his soulmate. On the other hand, the middle class American girls who tend to read these books are a lot more likely to be sexually assaulted by the Nice Guy in their life than to be kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery.
I really don’t know. The imprinting thing was about justifying men owning women and being allowed to abuse them, while this book doesn’t have anything about how it’s okay to beat your wife and at least gets that this is a traumatic thing that happens to innocent girls. But the author of Twilight seems to have an understanding of minimum age of consent, even if there’s some really screwy execution of it – if this author was writing it, there’d be actual babyfucking instead of creepy grooming for when they’re old enough.
Subjectively, I feel that this is much worse than Twilight. I enjoy a good Let’s Read of Twilight and getting my rage on over its anti-feminist aspects, whereas reading even the most rudimentary summary of Wither makes me feel sick. I suspect the difference is that the abuse apologia and general moral awfulness in Twilight is relatively sparse and broken up by absurdities like vampires sparkling in the sun and Bella’s breath catching when Edward kisses her to the point that she literally faints. Wither, as Farla has pointed out, is all rape all the time.
When I read this book I kept thinking that Gabriel was inserted just to make Rhine’s longing for her brother seem less incest-y. Admittedly, if someone had kidnapped me away from my brother I would miss him a lot too, but there were times where it just felt weird in this book. I really see why Rhine if she was so happy with Lindon (and she did seem pretty happy at times, and when she upset it was for ALL the wrong reasons) couldn’t just tell the doctor about her brother and have him brought to her. He had the same mismatched eye thing going on as Rhine, and he’s her twin. That would porbably make him of some value to the doctor’s work. It would also make it so that her brother doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life working shitty jobs.
Edited for word use failure.
But he is EVIL! everything he does is EVIL! even if he pet a cat he is doing it in some EVIL! way
He could actually succeed in his attempts to save the world and Rhine would think that was just horrible.