Hannah

Wallis covers this story thoroughly and with heart, reviewing everything from the first inklings of an issue with Horizon to the massive cover up and court cases that followed while still taking the time to focus on the individuals who were so profoundly impacted by the frankly evil actions of the post office. As we proceed into a new age of AI, I think this is a really important cautionary tale of what happens when we blindly trust technology to be the judge, jury, and executioner without the protections of human verification.

I trust T. Kingfisher to tell a good story, I think only she could tell me "I'm about to tell you a story about the evil god of road runners" and have me nodding along. The world building here was lovely, the desert community with it's oddly named homes and even odder people formed a place I fell in love with. I will now fantasize about the idea of running away to a small desert town that just gives you a house and lets you putter around your garden all day (minus the scorpions and the black widows).

C'mon padre, doesn't the lord promise something about floods?

He promised not to destroy the world. Individuals are still expected to get to high ground.

This is an extremely difficult read emotionally. Jackson builds the world and characters in bright colors then takes you along step by step with every heartbreak and dismissal and desperate action that Claudia takes to try and find her missing friend. My heart broke every time Claudia's concerns were dismissed, I was so mad at every adult in this book for their inaction and so devastated for all the children hurt because of it - Claudia and Monday and April and the real stories Jackson based this novel on where kids had no one to advocate for them. The conclusion had me crying in public on a park bench.

Outside of the subject matter, Claudia herself is such a lovable character. I loved the way she viewed her relationships with others through colors. Her dyslexia is integrated so perfectly through the slow improvement of her journal entries to Monday versus the final "voice" of the future Claudia narrating the novel.

If Monday were a color, she'd be red. Crisp, striking, vivid, you couldn't miss her - a bullseye in the room, a crackling flame. I saw so much red that it blinded me to any flags

The Secret History captured me immediately with it's opening line.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

This one sentence captures the magic of the novel itself - lyrical but with a strong sense of place that doesn't distance itself from the action. I was also surprised by the absolutely wild plot and the intense set of characters who slowly disintegrate like a slow burn thriller. I honestly went in expecting something slightly boring and pretentious. The most pulse racing aspect of this is not fast, it is patient. The murders have happened, the culprits have gotten away. Then we spend the latter half of the book observing the slow psychological decline of all involved while the rose-colored glasses are removed from our eyes. The beautiful charming twins become an incest-filled pattern of abuse, the brilliant leader is an psychopathic cliche with grandiose tendencies who poisons dogs (the bastard), the enigmatic professor is just a coward who enabled his students to feel entitled to murder. This descent merges in interesting ways with lectures from said professor and kicked off a lot of pondering for me on aesthetic academics and the psychological impact of feeling that you exist in a sphere above the common folk.

Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?...Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and nothing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skimmed knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own...Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?"

In my view, Richard remained the only slightly sympathetic character because his own poverty and the peek into his home situation reveal the desperation that led him to tolerate and assist in his new rich friends' horrible actions. Even the reader initially falls into the dream with him - a life where all his friends graduate together and live together forever in that nice country home where nothing ever changes. Only he seems to internally struggle both during and after Bunny's murder, to him Bunny was part of that dream.

I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. Is seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry with him. These were the times he chose to attack...I would vow not to forget it again. I broke that promise many times. I was about to say it was a promise I finally had to keep, but that's not really true. Even today, I can't muster anything resembling anger at Bunny. In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair... saying "Dickie my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?"

I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which is fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at 12..."who is in control here?" I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?

The gist of all this is that being able to quote text in Greek and Latin doesn't excuse you from living a moral life or put you above the constraints of society. Even if you get away with this breaking of moral boundaries, you cannot escape from yourself: "I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."

Nice story written with a lot of love, but a bit too cutesy for me. If you’ve read an Emily Henry and thought “I loved it but I wish it had EVEN MORE witty dialogue”, you’d probably love this book