The Painted Man

The lives of ~12 years old kids/teens in remote, rural, small towns in medieval times. Love, betrothals, daughters fulfilling ‘all' the roles of a dead mother, incomprehension of the adult world while longing to belong to it. This book has nothing I care to read about.

The book has at least two small stories, each one with a different protagonist. The first one is a ~12 years old boy, who decided he has had enough of being afraid of the demons who attack their village at night. All the adults says that he should be inside his house, behind the magical wards that keep the demons away. The boy disagrees. After seeing his mother die by the hands of a demon, he calls his dad a coward. As he finds out he has just been engaged to a ‘girl', yuck, he flees from home and goes alone into the wild, risking death from the demons, who are everywhere but comes out only at night.

The second protagonist is another ~12 years old girl, and I stopped reading here.

Among the things that bothered me, when the boy sees his mother being attacked by demons, he runs to her. He should have been killed, but instead he saves his mother life. He did not have a plan, nor did execute any clever maneuver during his ‘attack'. He just went for it. And the conclusion he takes from his lucky victory? Adults are stupid, his dad is a coward.

In another scene, after his mother's death, he asks his father: “And what will we do now?”, the father answers “Bury the body”. And that triggers him. How dare you be rational in a moment like this????

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