“The book is pretty, but even though the story doesn’t seem too complicated, damned if I know what was happening at the end.
It’s kind of weird because it’s not super plotty or anything, but by the end, I wasn’t really sure who was doing what or why.
The characters not having faces made it a little tough. I think it’s do-able, but when you’ve got three mains with 3 similar silhouettes and no faces, and one of them is borrowing the other’s clothes, it gets more complex than necessary.
I guess I don’t actually know if girls were going missing, if something was killing them, if everyone was already dead…I dunno!
The main character does remind me of fights I’ve had with people I’ve dated.
Something that seems to vex me from time to time in relationships is when there’s CLEARLY something wrong, but my partner doesn’t want to talk about it, but also is making it very clear that something is wrong, and that the something is a thing that I’m at least partially responsible for.
I’m totally up for “We don’t have to talk about this now.” But I prefer if I can at least get a two-sentence summary so that I can consider my own behavior and so on, if needed. If I’m being a jerk in a way that I don’t realize, it’s good if I can switch gears, you know? Not make the problem worse for the period it takes for my partner to decide, okay, we can chat about this now?
In Night Cry, the Witch (that’s not what they call her in the book, but go with it) writes kind of a zine, and issue 38 has some kind of deep, personal secret in it or something. And she puts it on the shelf at her bookstore where anyone can pick it up, but she prices it too high for purchase so that nobody will and her deep personal feelings will be kept deep and personal.
So it’s like, “Here’s this thing I don’t want anyone to pay attention to, but also…I guess I DO want people to pay attention to it, because here it is on the bookshelf in a store people can just walk into.”
It’s a little bit how I feel about writing books myself: there are things I write for me, and if it’s for me and I don’t want anyone else to read it, or I don’t want anyone to dislike it because that’d be super hurtful, I just don’t put it out there, you know? Why do that?
This concludes the portion of my stand-up act: Women be all having emotional turmoil like this, men be having it like that.”