Reflections

★ ★ ★ 1/2
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Okay, I've already published entries on the individual chapters/episodes. So here, I've collected them all in one handy-dandy (and long) post, and then added a few thoughts on the book as a whole.

Episode One: Forbidden Doors ★ ★ ★

Fairy tales are not for children, and they don't care who dies. They never have.

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Henrietta Marchen was a perfect exemplar of her kind. Her skin was white as snow, and never tanned or freckled; the best she'd ever been able to accomplish was a violent burn that turned her entire body as red as her lips, which were the color of fresh-drawn blood. Once, in the third grade, she had gotten in a fight with another student who insisted on calling her a clown. She had blackened both his eyes, and he had mashed her red lips back against her white teeth, until real blood appeared to make the contrast in her coloration even more glaring. She had smiled, bloody toothed and feral, until he started crying for his mommy, and he'd never called her clown again, and her classmates had stopped looking her in the eye.

I lifted the apple, turned it to the side without tooth marks, and took a bite. It was firm and crisp and a little too floral for my taste. I've never understood the way Snow Whites yearn for apples, but then, they've never understood the way I long to kill them all, so I figure it balances out in the end.

So we were going to do this the hard way. Fine. I'm Sloane Winters: I invented the hard way. “You want to ignore what's right in front of your faces, that's okay by me. I'll just laugh even harder when it turns around and bites you. Assholes.”
“Thanks for the motivational speech, Sloane,” said Andrew, wrinkling his nose. “Any time I start to feel like things are going well, all I have to do is remember your contributions to this team.”

Dying, as it turned out, was quite a pleasant thing. The world went soft around the edges, taking all the pain and confusion and betrayal with it. They had seemed so important not long ago, when time had been measured in years, not in seconds. Now, it was finally clear that they'd never really mattered at all.

after

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”. . .we're going to stop Adrianna and Birdie from doing whatever it is that they're planning to do.” Distort the narrative. Turn the stories that wouldn't stop replaying to their advantage. We knew the broad strokes, but we'd never quite managed to unsnarl the details. I wasn't sure they had either. We'd been at their heels every step of the way, and it's hard to properly plot your evil empire when the damn heroes won't stop harrying you.

Reflections

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story

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