Indeed. It made me go read some of Wein's earlier work, but I didn't like it nearly as much.

I do want a yuletide crossover of CNV, Narnia, and Montmaray, starting all the awesome women fighting Nazis.

OH MY GOD CODE NAME VERITY OH MY GOD.

I just went through so many fucking emotions on the drive to work today. First, she reveals her real name and FOR FUCK'S SAKE SHE WAS ANOTHER CHARACTER IN THE STORY ALL THIS TIME TOO. Second, the reader fucking brought me to tears with her ever-more-emotional repetition of "I have told the truth." Third, DRAT DOUBLE DRAT MADDIE'S FUCKING ALIVE MADDIE IS FUCKING ALIVE MADDIE MADDIE MADDIIIIIE GO FUCKING SAVE JULIE PLEASE.

Oh, P-C.

t offers tissues

Also, I can't believe you didn't know the narrator was Queenie. Seriously?

No, of course I knew that. I already posted about that. But she's Queenie, and she's ALSO Eva, and then she's ALSO Stewart (and this time she even provided all the goddamn flashback lines to put those scenes in context).

I'm deriving great delight from this reaction. There's a lot of HSQ in this book!

It looks like I've got about a couple hours left, so I think I'll wait a week and save this whole last stretch for the drive from Chattanooga to Nashville (my rental car better have auxiliary input) rather than break it up over a week.

Ugh IT WAS MADDIE'S IDEA TO SEND IN THE REPORTER. MADDIE IS FUCKING SLEEPING IN THE ROOM OF JULIE'S TORTURER. GODFUCKINGDAMMIT.

Cool. We can discuss it at dinner.

Anyone else read "The Flamethrowers"?(especially if you can tell me why it got such orgasmic reviews. Although it is helping its cause that it smells marginally less of hippie perfume.) Don't get me wrong--I like it fine, and have moderate curiosity about what happens to our narrator, but I have no desire to stop what I'm doing and rewrite it like Rachel Kushner would or anything...is this another thing I missed because I went to a state university?

I started the last Skulduggery Pleasant book finally. Now that I'm several chapters in to it, the first chapter confuses the shit out of me. (Which I'm aware it's meant to do, and I have no doubt it will all make sense sooner or later, but it's still bugging me.) (I'm also perplexed by the reflection ignoring the memory stick that was delivered to the Edgleys' house. I have a theory about that, but I'll just put a pin in my theory for now.)

I haven't put the book in the freezer. YET.

I just finished it. I read the whole series in about a month (well, the last 6 - I read the first three from my library a while ago) and it is amazing. And cost me a pretty penny in Canadian dollars.

Regarding the stick, my thought when reading that was that it just didn't occur to her it might have something to do with her. Nobody in the magical world works through USB sticks so she probably assumed it doesn't have anything to do with her secrets.

It is a satisfying conclusion, and will probably not require freezering, though there is plenty of darkness. The darkness started several books ago, though, so if you could handle them you should be able to handle this one. And, yeah, first chapter is confusing and will be so for a long while.

I keep thinking: this series has a lot in common with Harry Potter in some ways; magic, humorous dialog, lots of worldwide deadly threats that only seem to take place in the one, fairly small, country that happens to be the major setting. But this series is better in two distinct ways: first, it actually acknowledges the existence of other countries, makes them integral to the plot, and does a pretty good job of explaining why we don't hear much from them in many of the stories. And second, OH MY GOD IT REALLY FEELS LIKE WAR.

Harry Potter got a lot darker as the series progressed, but J.K. Rowling never really wrote about war. She wrote about some battles, but was never able to take it to the large scale (A.J. Hall did it better in her fic). But, God, Skulduggery Pleasant pulls it off over and over again. It's like Harry Potter stakes with Hunger Games realistic, painful, believability and descriptive violence.

It is so, so good. But I kind of get why it hasn't been published in the US all the way through. I cringed a lot.