Which is, if you have read this book, the end.
So I've been busy and exhausted and I'm trying to knit a baby blanket and also I decided to knit a scarf for a friends birthday but with cabling and I have never done that before so I've been concentrating on that and my *minor* perfectionism problem may make it very important that I concentrate super hard on not dropping a stitch or, and this is what happened with my nephews baby blanket, I rip the whole thing apart and start over. That blanket could have been ready months before it was if I'd just learned to be cool with fixing the problem like a normal human.
But anyway, so I hadn't read much of the book over the last couple of weeks and then um, I binged it last night.
So.
Hal gets into town with something like thirty pounds to her name, and it is, of course, raining because it is a funeral in a murder mystery. Mr. Treswick (the lawyer) lets Hal into the church and we get through Hal's awkward knowledge that she is definitely doing something wrong, but again, she is desperate to not get her everything broken and I cannot blame her.
There's no room in the 'official funeral cortege' so Mr. Treswick drives Hal to the house and honestly it wouldn't be out of place in a ghost story. Then again I just finished watching the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (LOVED IT) and so maybe creepy houses just need ghosts right now.
Also I keep misreading the name of the house as 'Trespassen' not 'Trepassen' but that's just me.
We meet Mrs. Warren, who would put Mrs. Dudley to shame (Haunting of Hill House for the win) for cranky and uselessly obscure statements and Hal's 'uncles'. There's Harding, his wife Mitzi and their kids, then Abel (who is gay and whose husband is a doctor) and Ezra, who lives the high life out in France. Because Europe.
There's scotch and talking and meeting everyone and no one seems to think much of Hal except oh, yes, her mother was their sister who disappeared (Ezra's twin, BTW) and then Mr. Treswick gets to the reading of the will and oh, hey, that little legacy that Hal thought would solve all her problems turns out to be the whole damn estate.
Harding mildly loses his shit - as the oldest and the one that sort of stuck around, he seems to have thought that he would inherit, and also, in fairness, who the fuck is Hal?
Hal passes out, which, same.
She's stressed, hasn't eaten, is cold, and just got told she's maybe a millionaire? I mean the house is in shitty condition but you can 100% sell it and there's other monies. I too would pass the fuck out.
Anyway.
Hal wakes up and gets shoved into the attic equivalent of Harry Potter's cupboard under the stairs, which is to say that this is a giant fucking house you cannot tell me that there were not guest rooms. Mrs. Warren is just....so mean.
Mrs. Warren continues to be not the actual worst person in this book, but she's pretty bad.
Hal, through snooping and context clues, figures out that she is related to the family, but it's more like a cousin to the main family than the long lost granddaughter. Turns out the missing daughter, Maud, her real name was Margarida and the cousin, who went by Maggie, was also really named Margarida.
And the diary entries that are peppered throughout the book are from Maggie, who was living with the family after her own parents died and got pregnant while she was there when she was 18. But Hal thinks she's figured out where the mistake by Mr. Treswick came from.
She tries, really, she does, to like reject the will but her uncles are the executors of the will and they don't all want to let her do that, and it's mostly Ezra who is just like, 'NAH'. Which, in hindsight, makes sense because we go through this whole song and dance and Hal really likes the family (for the most part) and decides that she can't do this to them - ALSO SOMEONE TRIES TO MURDER HER by that whole thing where they put some string over the top of the stairs so you trip and goddamnit that is a Poirot call back. It's from Dumb Witness. Anyway.
I want to know who the hell else got tripped down those stairs - when Hal examines the nails they are old and rusty and HAD CLEARLY BEEN THERE A WHILE.
So Hal nopes the hell out in the middle of the night and we find out that Mrs. Warren 100% knows that Hal is not Maud's daughter, and just wants her gone, but Hal then feels bad for just running away and also she knows that they are not going to just let her vanish they literally know where she lives. So she calls and comes back and she's poking around and finds the maid who used to help smuggle letters between Maud and Maggie who was locked in the attic while she was pregnant because Mrs. Westaway was a monster and Maggie won't tell her who got her pregnant.
Hal tells Lizzie the whole story and she knows that she's going to have to confess the whole thing to the family but it also helps her figure out that Maud and Maggie ran away together and were living together but since Hal doesn't know Maud she vanished for real before Hal was old enough to remember her.
Hal confesses, sort of. She tells the family that she was confused like everyone else, but she's figured out that she is the daughter of Maggie, not Maud, and the names are the same, yada, yada. And Harding thinks this solves everything, and Mr. Treswick is like...nah....but that sort of gets brushed aside because there's a storm and everyone is getting the heck away from Trepassen and Ezra gives Hal a ride to the station but then there are no trains and they wind up having to go back to the house.
And this is where I was actually shocked.
So Hal, Ezra and supposedly Mrs. Warren are alone in the house and Hal has this nagging feeling that she is so close to figuring out something - she wants to know who her father is, but her mother had removed any mention of his name from her diary so there's no clue there.
She wanders down to this library that she had found earlier and there's a photo album that she takes to look through and as she's flipping through she realizes that Maud is, in fact her mother.
And I shrieked, 'SHE WHAT?!?!' at like 1 am.
SO.
Hal, not having labels or any knowledge of these people, had figured out that she was the Maggie daughter by dint of this picture that Ezra had given her of himself, Maud, and this other girl who was Maggie.
But I guess he didn't use his fucking finger to point to anyone, because it turns out that the girl that Hal knew as her mother, who she assumed was Maggie, was, in fact, Maud. But Maud was not the one who was pregnant!
*deep sigh*
SO.
Maggie and Maud ran away when Maggie was pregnant and they lived together and Hal was born and they were raising her together for a little while. And then Maggie marched her happy blond ass back to the mansion to demand that Hal's father support the baby. And Maggie never came back.
So Maud raised Hal.
Hal is the daughter of BOTH Margarida's.
And also Ezra, who is garbage and I did not see that coming.
Turns out nice uncle Ezra is actually human garbage father Ezra who murdered Maggie when she came up demanding that he support his daughter and he hid her body in the lake and then he years later murdered Maud - he's the one who ran her over in the street, his own twin sister, because Maud was going to tell Hal the truth when she turned 18 and then he murdered Mrs. Warren and was going to murder Hal because MONSTER.
But Hal gets away, gets onto the lake which is iced over, and while Hal is a tiny slip of a human being, Ezra is not and he falls through the ice and drowns which is how he killed Maggie, so good.
End result - the will was accurate, Mrs. Westaway knew who Hal really was, and left her everything. Questionable whether she did it because she felt any shred of guilt for harboring a monster for decades or whether she just was such a monster she wanted to kick things up when she was unable to suffer any consequences. Mrs. Warren also knew that Ezra was a monster, but he was her favorite too, so whats a little murder?
Hal inherits all the things, and it seems like the rest of the family is actually embracing her and I'm pleased with everything.
She also tells them where she thinks Maggie's body is - the reason Ezra didn't want to let her give away her inheritance was likely because any work at the house would include dredging the lake where he had hidden Maggie's body.
I loved this book, and I did not see the whole 'it was Ezra' thing coming. Which is nice, since I normally at least have an inkling of what the secret twist is.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2018
Sunday, September 30, 2018
The Death of Mrs. Westaway Ch 1 - 7 by Ruth Ware
Okay, so I didn't get a lot of reading time this week. Even though the chapters in this book are super short, I didn't make it very far. But that's why we have the new rules!
Anyway.
I'm guessing that this is a thing that Ruth Ware likes to do, where she starts the book with a scene that clearly comes from later in the book.
So, the first seven chapters seem to be a lot of set up.
We meet Hal, who is barely scratching out a living as a psychic on the boardwalk? Is it a boardwalk if it's in England? She's living in the worlds shittiest apartment, which may or may not have heat depending on the moment, and she's barely eating. She's getting threatening notes from a loan shark and wow, you find out later that his rates are super not reasonable.
But I guess that's why they're loan sharks.
So she borrowed $500 from Mr. Smith back months ago and the interest rate is just insane, so even with having paid him back what she estimates to be something like $1500 she still owes him over $3000 according to his math.
She's got no money to pay him, no money to pay her rent, no money to pay the lease on the booth that she uses to make her living, such as it is, and no idea what she's going to do. She's a 'psychic' in the cold read, let people answer their own questions kind of way - she does tarot out of preference, and I get the impression that her mother held the same trade, though she did palm reading and the other usual psychic tricks as well. Hal will do them if she has to, but she prefers the cards.
Hal's mother has passed away, back when Hal was still in British high school (listen, all I know about British schools comes from Harry Potter and I'm going to assume Hal did not go to Hogwarts) and Hal has been on her own since. She's got no other family, not really any friends.
She is alone and she is progressively getting more and more in debt and she sees no way out.
And then, in the midst of a pile of bills that she cannot pay, she receives a letter telling her that she is an heir to some fortune, according to the Will of one Mrs. Hester Mary Westaway. Which would be great, except that she is 100% sure that she is not related to this dead woman, who is ostensibly her grandmother.
And Hal is arguing with herself, trying to tell herself that there has been a mistake and they got the wrong Hal. After all, she dug through her mothers papers and her grandparents are definitely not Mrs. Westaway. At least, on her mothers side. She knows nothing about her father, but given that Hal's name is Harriet Westaway and that Westaway was her mothers maiden name (we assume) it seems unlikely that this would be from her fathers side.
However, the loan shark is sending people around and Hal is getting very desperate.
And after all, if anyone could pull this off, it would be someone who makes their living cold reading strangers and telling them what they want to hear.
I do find it interesting that the first reading that we see in detail is where Hal is reluctantly doing a tarot reading for an older woman who sort of forces her way in after Hal has closed shop. The woman is trying to decide what to do about her son who is a drug addict. And Hal, who tries very hard to not tell people things that aren't true - she doesn't tell them about messages from long dead relatives, etc. reads the cards and basically tells her that she needs to go with her instincts - that she knows what she needs to do.
And the woman pays her with apparently way too much money, but is gone before Hal can give her the excess back. And when Hal chases after her, she's long gone off the promenade. So Hal donates the excess money to the charity of the month on the boardwalk, which just happens to be one for addiction recovery.
I mean I think we're meant to understand that Hal is a generally nice person who has found herself in an impossible situation.
But that's as far as I've gotten, so I guess we'll find out.
Anyway.
I'm guessing that this is a thing that Ruth Ware likes to do, where she starts the book with a scene that clearly comes from later in the book.
So, the first seven chapters seem to be a lot of set up.
We meet Hal, who is barely scratching out a living as a psychic on the boardwalk? Is it a boardwalk if it's in England? She's living in the worlds shittiest apartment, which may or may not have heat depending on the moment, and she's barely eating. She's getting threatening notes from a loan shark and wow, you find out later that his rates are super not reasonable.
But I guess that's why they're loan sharks.
So she borrowed $500 from Mr. Smith back months ago and the interest rate is just insane, so even with having paid him back what she estimates to be something like $1500 she still owes him over $3000 according to his math.
She's got no money to pay him, no money to pay her rent, no money to pay the lease on the booth that she uses to make her living, such as it is, and no idea what she's going to do. She's a 'psychic' in the cold read, let people answer their own questions kind of way - she does tarot out of preference, and I get the impression that her mother held the same trade, though she did palm reading and the other usual psychic tricks as well. Hal will do them if she has to, but she prefers the cards.
Hal's mother has passed away, back when Hal was still in British high school (listen, all I know about British schools comes from Harry Potter and I'm going to assume Hal did not go to Hogwarts) and Hal has been on her own since. She's got no other family, not really any friends.
She is alone and she is progressively getting more and more in debt and she sees no way out.
And then, in the midst of a pile of bills that she cannot pay, she receives a letter telling her that she is an heir to some fortune, according to the Will of one Mrs. Hester Mary Westaway. Which would be great, except that she is 100% sure that she is not related to this dead woman, who is ostensibly her grandmother.
And Hal is arguing with herself, trying to tell herself that there has been a mistake and they got the wrong Hal. After all, she dug through her mothers papers and her grandparents are definitely not Mrs. Westaway. At least, on her mothers side. She knows nothing about her father, but given that Hal's name is Harriet Westaway and that Westaway was her mothers maiden name (we assume) it seems unlikely that this would be from her fathers side.
However, the loan shark is sending people around and Hal is getting very desperate.
And after all, if anyone could pull this off, it would be someone who makes their living cold reading strangers and telling them what they want to hear.
I do find it interesting that the first reading that we see in detail is where Hal is reluctantly doing a tarot reading for an older woman who sort of forces her way in after Hal has closed shop. The woman is trying to decide what to do about her son who is a drug addict. And Hal, who tries very hard to not tell people things that aren't true - she doesn't tell them about messages from long dead relatives, etc. reads the cards and basically tells her that she needs to go with her instincts - that she knows what she needs to do.
And the woman pays her with apparently way too much money, but is gone before Hal can give her the excess back. And when Hal chases after her, she's long gone off the promenade. So Hal donates the excess money to the charity of the month on the boardwalk, which just happens to be one for addiction recovery.
I mean I think we're meant to understand that Hal is a generally nice person who has found herself in an impossible situation.
But that's as far as I've gotten, so I guess we'll find out.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Smoke in the Sun by Renee Ahdieh
Right.
So here's how it's going to have to go. It's just going to be, every Sunday, however far I've gotten in the chosen book, that's how far we are. Because three chapters a week is killing me slow, but some books that I have lined up are probably going to take me more than a week to read. And that's not even factoring in that some weeks I have less time to read than others.
There is no plan, we're just winging it!!!
Last week, I read Smoke in the Sun, by Renee Ahdieh. It's a YA book, and the second in a duology. I'd read the first one some time ago - I actually have three autographed books by this author, I got to meet her when I went to the RT convention back in 2017 with Texas Heather. :)
The first series by Ms. Ahdieh is sort of a retelling of the whole, 1,001 Nights conceit, which, I think everyone knows? But if you don't the whole idea is that there is this king and his wife betrays him. So in order to keep that from happening again, he marries a new wife every night and then executes her in the morning. And while this has SO MANY logical flaws, not the least of which is that you are definitely setting yourself up to get assassinated if you just keep murdering women left right and center, but that's not the point. A noble-woman named Scheherazade is next up and she's like, 'Okay, I get it, fine. But before we get to the wedding night and the executing and all could I please tell my little sister a bed time story?' and the king, WHILE A MONSTER, is not a monster and lets her tell her little sister the story and of course he gets into it and Scheherazade stops right in the middle so he's just...fine. You can live to finish the story tomorrow night!
And this goes on for a LONG time until he falls in love and stops planning to murder her.
So the first duology is The Wrath & the Dawn, and then The Rose & The Dagger and it's that general idea, but there's curse and yada yada. They're very good books, especially if you like romance and fantasy. They are YA, so there's no graphic sex or violence 'on screen' as it were.
Right.
So, this pair of books is set in....Asia. Maybe Japan? It's fantasy fiction so maybe not super important but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be Japan.
The first book, Flame in the Mist, is definitely necessary to know what the hell is going on in this one. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but basically we start with a young boy watching his father be executed for betraying the emperor, and you know that'll be important, but then we jump ahead in time and we're with Mariko, the only daughter of a powerful daimyo who is on her way to the capital to marry the illegitimate son of the emperor. Or. I mean he's acknowledged, and he's the oldest, but he's the son of one of the emperor's mistresses, so he's not in line to the throne. Raiden, is his name and he's a big bully. His younger brother Roku (which is the name of my tv streaming box and I giggled the first couple of times I read it) is in line, since his mother is the empress.
So. Mariko is on her way to a life of luxurious captivity and she's not thrilled, but the honor of her family, etc. etc. And, of course, her caravan is attacked on the way to the capital and everyone is killed, including the maid that is riding in the little 'girls only' thingy. Mariko is the only survivor, and she winds up lost in the woods and has to kill a man to save herself - he deserves it, trust me. She believes, based on what happened, that the Black Clan (they be ninjas) attacked her and murdered these people that she knew and loved in some cases. So her plan is to infiltrate the ninjas and find out why and also get revenge.
And this goes swimmingly.
It does not go swimmingly.
However, through much trial, she winds up living with the ninjas and becomes 'one of them' while also disguised as a boy and having a sort of romance with the second in command of the Black Clan who *SPOILERS* turns out to be the actual leader and the kid from the beginning of the book and he's the son of the last shogun who was betrayed by his friend who was then killed by the emperor who hey, is a bag of dicks.
*waves hands*
Basically, we go through so many things and we wind up with Kenshin, Mariko's twin brother, on the side of the emperor and his beloved Amaya believed to be dead but she's not really dead because Kanako (Raiden's mother) has her magicked into a tree (she's inside the tree, not turned into a tree) and Mariko is in the hands of the emperor's forces, and they're the bad guys (not the ninjas) and Okami (shogun's son, leader of the ninjas) captured - also, hey, he maybe sold himself to a demon so he can turn into smoke and his best friend Asano Tsuneoki ALSO sold (maybe his soul? not clear) so he could be a night beast which is like...half bear half wolf? and all magical badass and Mariko is pretending to be on the side of the empire in order to find out who tried to kill her and also to save Okami.
AND.
The empress poisons her husband and puts Roku on the throne.
Whee.
Smoke in the Sun.
Right.
Mariko has to work the palace intrigue, which is tough, these people are mostly horrible. But she also gets to use her alchemical knowledge (she's smart, of course, but not allowed to use her brains in the society she lives in) and her ninja skills to try and save Okami.
Who is being tortured down in the dungeon by Roku who, apparently, takes after his father and is a monster. He really is.
Like, for example, he definitely enjoys torturing people. A lot. A lot.
And his father murdered and betrayed friends and family in order to solidify his empire. Which, is how empires are made, but still makes him a horrible person. Who died SO BADLY.
Mariko is in this weird, trusted but not position. On the one hand, her family is still rich and powerful and loyal to the emperor and she (as far as anyone knows) was a victim of the Black Clan and their vendetta against the emperor. On the other hand, she's a young girl whose 'worth' is in her virginity to a great degree and she's been living in the woods with a bunch of men for months.
However, everyone agrees to the same lie, that Mariko was just a captive.
Because it would be SUPER awkward to admit that she and Okami were in love. And also that she'd gotten rid of her virginity WAY before that in an act of rebellion.
There's a lot of intrigue and backstabbing and magical goings on.
Kanako (Raiden's mother) is....I'm torn.
On the one hand, she does some bad, BAD stuff. She murders people with magic, takes over other peoples' minds to make *them* commit murder. She causes the death of this innocent kid and she's causing so much chaos and destruction to get her son on the throne.
She 100% murders the empress, which I'm torn on. Not because she didn't deserve to die, because she kind of did, but Kanako's reasoning is a little off to me. She talks about how the Emperor was weak willed, and horrible, and blah, blah, but then she avenges him by killing the empress? Fair, she did poison him, and she needed to get killed, but just admit that she's in your way, Kanako!
Also, Kanako is sort of a support to Mariko? And it turns out that she raised a much less insane son.
Raiden is...not the nicest person out there, but he's also not a monster. Once he and Roku start pulling apart, you can see that Raiden is the better of the two.
Anyway.
Mariko manages to get herself married to Raiden, though they never consummate the marriage. And Raiden starts proving he's Not the Worst in good part when he protects Mariko from his brother who is the literal worst, and also lies to his brother about Mariko being a virgin. Which he doesn't have a damn clue about, because again, they did not have sex. There's an assassination attempt on Roku at the wedding, and Okami finally escapes, ninja clan to the rescue, thanks to Mariko's plan, and Okami makes it out of the city which is then surrounded by...kind of zombies?
Kanako has just been attacking towns and mind controlling the people. So they're not *zombies* but they're also not really all there.
Anyway.
Turns out Okami is maybe part dragon?
This is one of the things that sort of threw me.
Like, okay.
His mother might have been a dragon.
Was probably a dragon.
BUT I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!!!!
As in, then where they hell did her family lands come from?
Why did she just NOPE back into the ocean at one point and never come back?
What does this mean for the deal that Okami made with a demon?
Can he turn into a dragon?
Was his fathers family also related to a phoenix?
There's a sword, it's a whole thing. I cannot say that it actually comes into play. Because it DOESN'T.
Did his dad know he was married to a DRAGON?
Honestly, the book is the book and I enjoyed it a lot.
But there's no surprises in it.
End of the day, Mariko and Okami are going to wind up together.
Tsuneoki winds up with no one because he's in love with Okami and just...exists. He was not given enough of an ending, dammit.
Roku winds up dead, because Raiden is done with his shit and realizes that his brother is a MONSTER.
Kanako also dies, in order to undo all the bad magic she's got flying around. She takes herself out, because magic has a price and she's too weak to stop it any other way. Still not sure how I feel about her.
Kenshin gets Amaya back? Maybe? I mean the magic keeping her secret hidden in the tree dies with Kanako, so maybe? I know she gets out of the three. Don't know if she winds up with Kenshin.
And Okami gets his fathers shogunate back.
BUT I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!!!
Like, DRAGON.
Like, as I understand it, Okami's deal with the demon means he can't ever have children, can't leave a legacy in the world. Which maybe isn't a problem, maybe he and Mariko don't care about that.
Look, most of my questions revolve around why would you tell me he's MAYBE PART DRAGON and then have it MEAN NOTHING!!!!
*sigh*
Maybe there are short stories out there that get more into it? But that annoys me. You can either throw in that HE'S A DRAGON and use it or leave it the fuck out.
And Tsuneoki deserves better.
*grumbles*
Dude is part dragon and it just means nothing, lets not do anything with it, why bother....
So here's how it's going to have to go. It's just going to be, every Sunday, however far I've gotten in the chosen book, that's how far we are. Because three chapters a week is killing me slow, but some books that I have lined up are probably going to take me more than a week to read. And that's not even factoring in that some weeks I have less time to read than others.
There is no plan, we're just winging it!!!
Last week, I read Smoke in the Sun, by Renee Ahdieh. It's a YA book, and the second in a duology. I'd read the first one some time ago - I actually have three autographed books by this author, I got to meet her when I went to the RT convention back in 2017 with Texas Heather. :)
The first series by Ms. Ahdieh is sort of a retelling of the whole, 1,001 Nights conceit, which, I think everyone knows? But if you don't the whole idea is that there is this king and his wife betrays him. So in order to keep that from happening again, he marries a new wife every night and then executes her in the morning. And while this has SO MANY logical flaws, not the least of which is that you are definitely setting yourself up to get assassinated if you just keep murdering women left right and center, but that's not the point. A noble-woman named Scheherazade is next up and she's like, 'Okay, I get it, fine. But before we get to the wedding night and the executing and all could I please tell my little sister a bed time story?' and the king, WHILE A MONSTER, is not a monster and lets her tell her little sister the story and of course he gets into it and Scheherazade stops right in the middle so he's just...fine. You can live to finish the story tomorrow night!
And this goes on for a LONG time until he falls in love and stops planning to murder her.
So the first duology is The Wrath & the Dawn, and then The Rose & The Dagger and it's that general idea, but there's curse and yada yada. They're very good books, especially if you like romance and fantasy. They are YA, so there's no graphic sex or violence 'on screen' as it were.
Right.
So, this pair of books is set in....Asia. Maybe Japan? It's fantasy fiction so maybe not super important but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be Japan.
The first book, Flame in the Mist, is definitely necessary to know what the hell is going on in this one. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but basically we start with a young boy watching his father be executed for betraying the emperor, and you know that'll be important, but then we jump ahead in time and we're with Mariko, the only daughter of a powerful daimyo who is on her way to the capital to marry the illegitimate son of the emperor. Or. I mean he's acknowledged, and he's the oldest, but he's the son of one of the emperor's mistresses, so he's not in line to the throne. Raiden, is his name and he's a big bully. His younger brother Roku (which is the name of my tv streaming box and I giggled the first couple of times I read it) is in line, since his mother is the empress.
So. Mariko is on her way to a life of luxurious captivity and she's not thrilled, but the honor of her family, etc. etc. And, of course, her caravan is attacked on the way to the capital and everyone is killed, including the maid that is riding in the little 'girls only' thingy. Mariko is the only survivor, and she winds up lost in the woods and has to kill a man to save herself - he deserves it, trust me. She believes, based on what happened, that the Black Clan (they be ninjas) attacked her and murdered these people that she knew and loved in some cases. So her plan is to infiltrate the ninjas and find out why and also get revenge.
And this goes swimmingly.
It does not go swimmingly.
However, through much trial, she winds up living with the ninjas and becomes 'one of them' while also disguised as a boy and having a sort of romance with the second in command of the Black Clan who *SPOILERS* turns out to be the actual leader and the kid from the beginning of the book and he's the son of the last shogun who was betrayed by his friend who was then killed by the emperor who hey, is a bag of dicks.
*waves hands*
Basically, we go through so many things and we wind up with Kenshin, Mariko's twin brother, on the side of the emperor and his beloved Amaya believed to be dead but she's not really dead because Kanako (Raiden's mother) has her magicked into a tree (she's inside the tree, not turned into a tree) and Mariko is in the hands of the emperor's forces, and they're the bad guys (not the ninjas) and Okami (shogun's son, leader of the ninjas) captured - also, hey, he maybe sold himself to a demon so he can turn into smoke and his best friend Asano Tsuneoki ALSO sold (maybe his soul? not clear) so he could be a night beast which is like...half bear half wolf? and all magical badass and Mariko is pretending to be on the side of the empire in order to find out who tried to kill her and also to save Okami.
AND.
The empress poisons her husband and puts Roku on the throne.
Whee.
Smoke in the Sun.
Right.
Mariko has to work the palace intrigue, which is tough, these people are mostly horrible. But she also gets to use her alchemical knowledge (she's smart, of course, but not allowed to use her brains in the society she lives in) and her ninja skills to try and save Okami.
Who is being tortured down in the dungeon by Roku who, apparently, takes after his father and is a monster. He really is.
Like, for example, he definitely enjoys torturing people. A lot. A lot.
And his father murdered and betrayed friends and family in order to solidify his empire. Which, is how empires are made, but still makes him a horrible person. Who died SO BADLY.
Mariko is in this weird, trusted but not position. On the one hand, her family is still rich and powerful and loyal to the emperor and she (as far as anyone knows) was a victim of the Black Clan and their vendetta against the emperor. On the other hand, she's a young girl whose 'worth' is in her virginity to a great degree and she's been living in the woods with a bunch of men for months.
However, everyone agrees to the same lie, that Mariko was just a captive.
Because it would be SUPER awkward to admit that she and Okami were in love. And also that she'd gotten rid of her virginity WAY before that in an act of rebellion.
There's a lot of intrigue and backstabbing and magical goings on.
Kanako (Raiden's mother) is....I'm torn.
On the one hand, she does some bad, BAD stuff. She murders people with magic, takes over other peoples' minds to make *them* commit murder. She causes the death of this innocent kid and she's causing so much chaos and destruction to get her son on the throne.
She 100% murders the empress, which I'm torn on. Not because she didn't deserve to die, because she kind of did, but Kanako's reasoning is a little off to me. She talks about how the Emperor was weak willed, and horrible, and blah, blah, but then she avenges him by killing the empress? Fair, she did poison him, and she needed to get killed, but just admit that she's in your way, Kanako!
Also, Kanako is sort of a support to Mariko? And it turns out that she raised a much less insane son.
Raiden is...not the nicest person out there, but he's also not a monster. Once he and Roku start pulling apart, you can see that Raiden is the better of the two.
Anyway.
Mariko manages to get herself married to Raiden, though they never consummate the marriage. And Raiden starts proving he's Not the Worst in good part when he protects Mariko from his brother who is the literal worst, and also lies to his brother about Mariko being a virgin. Which he doesn't have a damn clue about, because again, they did not have sex. There's an assassination attempt on Roku at the wedding, and Okami finally escapes, ninja clan to the rescue, thanks to Mariko's plan, and Okami makes it out of the city which is then surrounded by...kind of zombies?
Kanako has just been attacking towns and mind controlling the people. So they're not *zombies* but they're also not really all there.
Anyway.
Turns out Okami is maybe part dragon?
This is one of the things that sort of threw me.
Like, okay.
His mother might have been a dragon.
Was probably a dragon.
BUT I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!!!!
As in, then where they hell did her family lands come from?
Why did she just NOPE back into the ocean at one point and never come back?
What does this mean for the deal that Okami made with a demon?
Can he turn into a dragon?
Was his fathers family also related to a phoenix?
There's a sword, it's a whole thing. I cannot say that it actually comes into play. Because it DOESN'T.
Did his dad know he was married to a DRAGON?
Honestly, the book is the book and I enjoyed it a lot.
But there's no surprises in it.
End of the day, Mariko and Okami are going to wind up together.
Tsuneoki winds up with no one because he's in love with Okami and just...exists. He was not given enough of an ending, dammit.
Roku winds up dead, because Raiden is done with his shit and realizes that his brother is a MONSTER.
Kanako also dies, in order to undo all the bad magic she's got flying around. She takes herself out, because magic has a price and she's too weak to stop it any other way. Still not sure how I feel about her.
Kenshin gets Amaya back? Maybe? I mean the magic keeping her secret hidden in the tree dies with Kanako, so maybe? I know she gets out of the three. Don't know if she winds up with Kenshin.
And Okami gets his fathers shogunate back.
BUT I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!!!
Like, DRAGON.
Like, as I understand it, Okami's deal with the demon means he can't ever have children, can't leave a legacy in the world. Which maybe isn't a problem, maybe he and Mariko don't care about that.
Look, most of my questions revolve around why would you tell me he's MAYBE PART DRAGON and then have it MEAN NOTHING!!!!
*sigh*
Maybe there are short stories out there that get more into it? But that annoys me. You can either throw in that HE'S A DRAGON and use it or leave it the fuck out.
And Tsuneoki deserves better.
*grumbles*
Dude is part dragon and it just means nothing, lets not do anything with it, why bother....
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