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The Thornbacks
Chloe Wilson
Wide 👏 release 👏 when?? 👏
Good God this book is right up my alley and I can't find it available outside of Australia anywhere. Come on, Penguin! The girls crave mortuary satire!
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Thoughts from 30%-33% Claudia
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© 2025 Pagebound
Greenleaf commented...
The book was written explicitly as an expression of parental grief when Anne and Stan lost their daughter to leukemia at 5 years old. Christopher also still talks very candidly about this and how that loss truly changed his parents and set Anne on the path to being the specific artist she would eventually become. Claudia is Michele - or at least the perfect version of her that could live forever, but ultimately cannot. She is at once a perpetual, almost divine child as well as being fleeting and fragile. L&L began as sort of stand-in characters for Anne and her husband and eventually transformed into what Christopher describes as the past version of Anne and who she transformed herself into while learning how to survive that deep, consuming grief.
Claudia is doomed from the start because to capture thar child and force her to stay rather than to let her grow (or accept her mortality) is the ultimate cruelty. Michele never had the chance to grow up. She is frozen in time as that perpetual and fragile, divine child.