“… but Alice likes games, because games come with rules, and it’s easier to be bold when there are boundaries, edges, and ends).”

This feels entirely relatable.

Maria cracking a cherry pit with her teeth is actually insane, I was eating cherries at work while I read that, I can't even imagine accomplishing that

It's really fascinating to posit that "active hope" doesn't require optimism, and you can (and should) be actively hopeful in scenarios that make you feel hopeless. That seemed really counterintuitive to me, but I'm understanding that what they're suggesting here is that you can keep a practice of hope that doesn't rely on waiting to feel hopeful, only on having the intention to express hope. That it's less a passive experience of hope and more an active commitment to it. And because of that, because it doesn't require positivity but really just a faith in what is within your own agency, you can practice hope while also practicing grief, and they do not have to be mutually exclusive. I think that framing is really interesting.

Okay. Evidently an unpopular opinion gauging by all the other posts from up to this point, but I'm not that disturbed. As someone who doesn't read horror I was expecting to by nauseous by page 2 but like... While obviously it's messed up, it's still primarily conceptual, and pretty interesting at that. Not much different than any other dystopian speculative fiction so far. I imagine it's going to get a lot more graphic and repulsive but yeah at this point I'm definitely not experiencing what a lot of others seem to be, I'm actually pretty interested in the commentary on the social forces that have shaped this world

Referring to a bright red weed: "Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous."

Two pages later: Maria's hair is described as a liquid molten copper color that has gotten brighter as she has gotten older, and her looks as 'wild', striking, and undeniable, with all the men turning their heads and staring.

Hmmm I see what you did there VE Schwab. I'm going in blind and can't WAIT to see where this goes! :DDD