![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Saturday: martial arts, vic’s, reading
Sep. 7th, 2019 02:40 pmToday, I took T. to martial arts and Vic’s. It is nice to be back in the routine. Sensei G. told an amazing story about his mom (IIRC) hearing buzzing in her house one night, not being able to find any nest, calling in an exterminator, and then found it in the attic: two full bays worth of nest, biggest he had ever seen. Multiple trash bags to remove it all post-spraying. Yikes! That was the first nest she had ever spotted in her house, so her first opportunity to learn to look for point of entry when seeing wasps hanging about. Tough learning curve!
I read _Assassins: Discord_, by Erica Cameron. I found it a while back in a search for YA books that have characters (ideally viewpoint characters) who are not het / cis. In this case, viewpoint character is bisexual; her
SPOILERS!!!!!
Brother is asexual, which winds up being an important plot point.
There are all kinds of things that I found unlikeable in this book, however, it has amazing narrative momentum, so I not only finished it, I bought the other book in the duology (albeit after carefully looking over the reviews). I have no real affection for books in which the viewpoint character is a killer-for-hire, which is probably an inconsistent stance to take because I do not have a problem paying to have a job done / being paid to do a job, and I absolutely agree with the proposition that some people’s inevitable end ought to be hurried along. A lot.
In this case, the killer-for-hire is a family-for-hire, and the kids have been participating in the killing since they were wee (the two we know about in the beginning are still minors, and they have been involved for years). Worse, the parents do not apply any kind of metric to the jobs they take that is visible to the kids, and abuse the kids in numerous ways specifically to prevent the kids from having any other understanding of the jobs they take other than, we get paid.
Implausibly, our viewpoint character has her own moral universe, and it trips her up at the start of the book when the person the family is about to kill does not match her idea of the type of people whose end should be enabled. As she veers further and further from her family’s rules we hear her thinking in her head about the punishments she is risking, based on the past. Yikes! Very abusive family, seems to be driven by mom, and really unclear why mom would be the way she is, or why dad would play along. There are little hints dropped by other characters that mom might be coerced somehow, and, indeed
OKAY I DID MENTION SPOILERS I AM QUITE CERTAIN I MENTIONED SPOILERS SERIOUSLY SPOILERS
Mom’s sister (twin?) is somehow only safe if mom does what she is told.
This does not help!
To return to the main line of the book: the main bad guy is dealt with, the family ignored an apparent partner who turns out to play a much bigger role than was realized, the dead brother really dies (yeah, saw that coming), there is much agonizing over viewpoint character feelings Feelings FEELINGS over brother not rescuing her, but less agonizing over their collective decision not to rescue third sib. Cute romance between viewpoint character and the daughter of the family that has adopted brother. Etc. I really did enjoy seeing the contrast developed between the two families, and how seeing a family that loved each other but was also a family of murderers was what convinced the viewpoint character to believe it was possible to love and be loved. So Twisted it is almost delightful. But I am still wrestling with the metaphor here and have not worked it out to my satisfaction. Anyway.
First, why would someone have three kids if they had such a weird attachment thing going on that the aunt the kids do not know about is so important to mom that she will literally pimp her kids out, groom them as murderers and physically torture them herself to do the jobs she is hired to do to keep her sister safe? I mean, this seems odd to me.
Second, who would marry her and have three kids with her? OK, he is a nerdy sniper with a rescue complex. Plausible! Not rescuing the kids then fits for him. He is not driving any bus in the area. This is just more of his passivity, which he awakes from exclusively to try to protect the woman he loves.
STILL! Three kids? WTF? Maybe she has a baby complex? And then once they are not babies, she is like, whatev, at least you can seduce / kill people for me? I am confused. Mom is clearly a Big Bad and a hot mess, but she is such a hot mess she is pretty deeply confusing to me.
Finally, does aunt know what is going on? On some level, if I were aunt, and I found out my sister was doing this to my nieces to protect me, I would just kill myself. I mean, come on! The next generation is important!
I read _Assassins: Discord_, by Erica Cameron. I found it a while back in a search for YA books that have characters (ideally viewpoint characters) who are not het / cis. In this case, viewpoint character is bisexual; her
SPOILERS!!!!!
Brother is asexual, which winds up being an important plot point.
There are all kinds of things that I found unlikeable in this book, however, it has amazing narrative momentum, so I not only finished it, I bought the other book in the duology (albeit after carefully looking over the reviews). I have no real affection for books in which the viewpoint character is a killer-for-hire, which is probably an inconsistent stance to take because I do not have a problem paying to have a job done / being paid to do a job, and I absolutely agree with the proposition that some people’s inevitable end ought to be hurried along. A lot.
In this case, the killer-for-hire is a family-for-hire, and the kids have been participating in the killing since they were wee (the two we know about in the beginning are still minors, and they have been involved for years). Worse, the parents do not apply any kind of metric to the jobs they take that is visible to the kids, and abuse the kids in numerous ways specifically to prevent the kids from having any other understanding of the jobs they take other than, we get paid.
Implausibly, our viewpoint character has her own moral universe, and it trips her up at the start of the book when the person the family is about to kill does not match her idea of the type of people whose end should be enabled. As she veers further and further from her family’s rules we hear her thinking in her head about the punishments she is risking, based on the past. Yikes! Very abusive family, seems to be driven by mom, and really unclear why mom would be the way she is, or why dad would play along. There are little hints dropped by other characters that mom might be coerced somehow, and, indeed
OKAY I DID MENTION SPOILERS I AM QUITE CERTAIN I MENTIONED SPOILERS SERIOUSLY SPOILERS
Mom’s sister (twin?) is somehow only safe if mom does what she is told.
This does not help!
To return to the main line of the book: the main bad guy is dealt with, the family ignored an apparent partner who turns out to play a much bigger role than was realized, the dead brother really dies (yeah, saw that coming), there is much agonizing over viewpoint character feelings Feelings FEELINGS over brother not rescuing her, but less agonizing over their collective decision not to rescue third sib. Cute romance between viewpoint character and the daughter of the family that has adopted brother. Etc. I really did enjoy seeing the contrast developed between the two families, and how seeing a family that loved each other but was also a family of murderers was what convinced the viewpoint character to believe it was possible to love and be loved. So Twisted it is almost delightful. But I am still wrestling with the metaphor here and have not worked it out to my satisfaction. Anyway.
First, why would someone have three kids if they had such a weird attachment thing going on that the aunt the kids do not know about is so important to mom that she will literally pimp her kids out, groom them as murderers and physically torture them herself to do the jobs she is hired to do to keep her sister safe? I mean, this seems odd to me.
Second, who would marry her and have three kids with her? OK, he is a nerdy sniper with a rescue complex. Plausible! Not rescuing the kids then fits for him. He is not driving any bus in the area. This is just more of his passivity, which he awakes from exclusively to try to protect the woman he loves.
STILL! Three kids? WTF? Maybe she has a baby complex? And then once they are not babies, she is like, whatev, at least you can seduce / kill people for me? I am confused. Mom is clearly a Big Bad and a hot mess, but she is such a hot mess she is pretty deeply confusing to me.
Finally, does aunt know what is going on? On some level, if I were aunt, and I found out my sister was doing this to my nieces to protect me, I would just kill myself. I mean, come on! The next generation is important!