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chronicallybookish 's review for:
Angelfall
by Susan Ee
TW: ableism, maybe antisemitism?
Ableism against mentally ill/mentally disabled people, especially those with schizophrenia and/or psychosis
Ableism against physically disabled people, especially wheel chair users, those with paralysis, and those with dwarfism—including uses of slurs such as cr*pple and m*idg*t.
Some weird romanticization of the n*zi bullshit of the “aryan race”.
Where do I start with this review? From the first chapter, the ableism was running rampant. The vast majority of the ableism in this book was against Penryn’s mother, who is, according to Ee, a paranoid schizophrenic.
I’m going to be entirely honest and say I don’t know very much about schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia specifically. However, I’d wager a bet that Susan Ee knows even less than I do.
But, hey, look at that. I did a twenty second google search. Let’s see what that says.
Question: Are people with schizophrenia dangerous?
Answer: The APA (American Psychiatric Association) says people with schizophrenia are no more likely to present dangerous or violent behavior than the general population.
so let’s get into Penryn’s mother’s portrayal, shall we?
And yet, Ee’s portrayal of a paranoid schizophrenic is exceedingly violent and deranged. Penryn’s mother suffers delusions of demons. As far as I know, that’s a pretty common delusion. At first, we simply hear of her paranoia surrounding being watched/hunted/followed/tormented by demons. That’s fair enough.
The first true issue comes in chapter 7 when Penryn’s mother desecrates a corpse. Yeah, you heard that right.
Penryn and her mom have been separated after her sister was taken. Penryn hides out in a building that has a dead body in the lobby. At one point, she goes into the lobby and finds that the body, previously laying exactly as it had fallen, has now been posed, had makeup applied sloppily to it, and has a knife through its chest that was not previously there.
“When I walk out of the corner office, I find that the dead man in the foyer has been messed with. He seems to have lost all dignity since the last time I saw him.
“Someone has arranged for one hand to be propped on his hip while the other reaches up to his hair. His long, shaggy hair has been spiked as though electrocuted, and his mouth is smeared drunkenly with lipstick. His eyes are wide open with black felt lines radiating like sun rays from his sockets. In the middle of his chest, a kitchen knife that wasn’t there an hour ago sticks out like a flagpole. Someone stabbed a dead body for reasons only the insane can fathom.
“My mother has found me.” (pg. 29)
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
I honestly don’t know what to say. I feel like this speaks for itself. This event plays no role in the plot except to showcase the fact that her mother is deranged and dangerous. It perpetuates the false idea that schizophrenia causes people to be dangerous and plays into the stereotype that they are sadistic.
A few paragraphs later, we learn that Penryn’s sister, who uses a wheelchair due to paralysis from the waist down, is disabled because of an accident. Penryn says two-year-old Paige was found laying on the floor, with her mother standing over her. No one knows what really happened, but everyone believes it was the mother in a fit of “schizophrenic violence” (which as we have already established, isn’t actually a thing).
This implication is validated even more when, in the immediate aftermath of Paige’s accident, Penryn’s mother signs her up for half a dozen different self defense classes, and Penryn finds a collections of news paper clippings her mother has kept—articles about mothers who murdered their children. When her mother sees her looking at the articles, she simply tells her to keep going to the self defense classes.
In chapter 9, Penryn, Raffe, and her mother are attacked by gang members. They get separated, and as Penryn is escaping, she comes across a body on the floor. Her mother’s handiwork, so of course it’s not just a regular old self defense stabbing.
“I find a man lying in the hallway leading to the kitchen. His chest is bare, his shirt torn away. Six butter knives stick out of his flesh in a circular pattern. Someone has drawn a powder pink lipstick pentagram with the knives at the end of the points. Blood bubbles up from each of the knives. The man is all eyes and shock as he stares at the ruin of his chest as though unable to believe it has anything to do with him.
“My mother is safe.
“Seeing what she did to this man, I can’t help but wonder if that’s a good thing. She purposefully missed his heart, and he will slowly bleed to death.” (pg. 45)
Once again. What the fuck is this.
Again, there’s no real point to her mother torturing someone except to drive home the point that she’s dangerous, sadistic, and violent. I’m all for self defense. Man attacking you in post apocalyptic world? It’s kill or be killed. But sticking him with five butter knives, purposefully aiming to give him a slow, painful death, and then drawing on his body in lipstick… The whole point of that was the shock factor, relying heavily on the false “violent schizophrenic” stereotype.
After this point, we don’t see Penryn’s mother for a while. They’ve been separated, but it appears they are both heading in the same direction, since Penryn keeps finding “gifts” from her mother (rotten eggs, they’re rotten eggs.) along the way, always next to the site of brutal murders via cannibalism. At first, Penryn believes her mother could possibly be behind the cannibalistic murders, but she also thinks the eggs might be some kind of talisman against the evil that killed these people.
After the second or third set of bodies, they learn for a fact it isn’t her mother, but the fact that it is insinuated that she could be capable of this does so much harm, regardless of the fact that it isn’t truly her in the end.
Aside from a few more rotten eggs, we don’t see Penryn’s mother until page 172. But Penryn makes sure to tell us how “crazy” and “insane” her mother is plenty of times in the interim.
When we meet up with Penryn’s mother once again, she’s gotten herself a job guarding the fence surrounding the angels’ compound. Her job is to jab anyone who gets too close with some kind of pole that electrocutes them.
“My mother is more emotional about her job than her fellow prodders. She reaches as far as the fence will let her to shock as many people as possible. At one point she even cackles as she zaps a man for as long as she can before he staggers out of her reach. She looks for all the world as though she’s enjoying inflicting pain on people.” (pg. 172)
Penryn goes on to say that her mother is just afraid. She probably doesn’t even recognize the people as people. She probably thinks she’s in a cage in Hell surrounded by monsters, and finally has a weapon to fight back.
Being trapped in a delusion is fair enough. Portraying that state as causing her mother to be violent towards other people, torturing them and seemingly enjoying it, is very much not.
For the last bit of the book, Penryn’s mother doesn’t really feature. At the very end, she escapes with Penryn, but we barely see or hear from her.
I have a feeling that, as the series progresses, we’ll learn that Penryn’s mom isn’t actually responsible for Paige’s injury, and maybe even that her demonic delusions aren’t delusions at all. This isn’t a spoiler. I have nothing to base this on other than a gut feeling.
If this does happen, you may think—oh! That makes it okay then, because she’s not actually schizophrenic, so it’s not bad rep! That would be wrong. It is still atrocious rep.
Because even if Penryn’s mother’s violence and sadistic-ness isn’t due to schizophrenia in the end (which it may still be, I don’t know), Ee still attributes violence, a sadistic nature, murder, torture, and desecration of bodies as something that it makes sense for a schizophrenic person to do. Even if her mother doesn’t have paranoid schizophrenia, the entire first book, she commits these acts while we’re told she does, and therefore are told that these acts are something that can stem from schizophrenia. This is only possible through leaning into and heavily perpetuating the false stereotype that those with schizophrenia are violent and dangerous.
next, let’s talk about Paige, and other general ableism.
I have less to say here, because most of the other ableism is much more mild. Throughout the book, Penryn constantly calls Paige crippled or a cripple. This is considered a slur. She also calls Paige “wheelchair-bound” (pg. 116), which is considered offensive. The correct term is wheelchair user, because wheelchairs are not a disabled person’s binding or prison, they are their freedom.
Penryn also regularly refers to Paige as helpless and infantilizes her. I’m not sure how much of that is simply big sister-little sister dynamics, since Paige is 7, and how much is that Ee thinks disabled people and wheelchair users are helpless. I got the feeling that it was some of both.
I have one more thing I want to say about Paige, but it is a spoiler, so I’ll put it at the very end, clearly marked as a spoiler.
At the Aerie, Penryn meets an albino angel. My feelings on him are a little complicated. Albino=evil is a very common, and very ableist, trope. And in this world, angels are the bad guys. But Josaiah seems to be a kind of good guy—maybe? I’m not sure whether or not this plays into that stereotype.
However, the way Penryn talks about and describes him is offensive. She constantly refers to him as “The Albino” which felt… squicky. She didn’t know his name, but there were other ways to refer to him. Like, her target, the albino angel or simply the angel, since he’s the only angel of importance in that scene. I’m not sure how people with albinism tend to prefer to be referred to, so I can’t truly speak on that. It just didn’t quite feel right to me.
When Penryn first sees the angel, she isn’t sure why everyone is avoiding him. She basically says that lack of pigment isn’t any more disconcerting than giant wings (which, I guess fair? But also it really shouldn’t be disconcerting at all). And then she sees his eyes.
“They are bloodred. I’ve never seen anything like it. His irises are so large they take up most of his eyes. They are balls of crimson shot through with white, like miniature lightning bolts sizzling over blood.”
“The other angels, despite all their terrible aggression, look like they were made in Heaven. This one, on the other hand, looks like he walked right out of my mother’s nightmares.” (pg. 194)
This evil looking red-eyed angel plays on the popular stereotype that all albino people have red eyes, when in fact, the vast majority simply have very light blue or gray eyes. However, some people with albinism do have eyes that appear red, whether at times or most of the time, and using this trait and equating it to looking demonic is so incredibly offensive. Again, there is no reason Josaiah must be albino, other than the shock factor. If you removed that from his character, the story would be unchanged.
While psyching herself up to go talk to Josaiah, Penryn tells the reader that she’s “used to people with unnerving physical appearances” because of all the time she spends with Paige and her disabled friends. She gives the following examples:
“Her friend Judith was born with stumpy arms and tiny, malformed hands; Alex wobbled when he walked and had to contort his face painfully to form coherent words, which often let out an embarrassing amount of drool; Will was a quadriplegic who needed a pump to keep him breathing.” (pg. 194)
These descriptions seem so mean. She points out all the “unnerving” aspects of Paige’s friends in insulting ways. Again, it’s unnecessary. Visibly disabled people aren’t side shows to laugh and gawk at. The language Ee uses is purposefully derogatory. She hopes to illicit a disgusted reaction from her readers, to show how “good of a person” Paige is for taking these kids under her wings since her disability is more socially acceptable, and to show how tolerant Penryn is that she has put up with “more than [her] fair share of hanging around people whose physical appearance is unnerving” (pg. 194).
Lastly, for this section, on page 230, Penryn’s friend Dee-Dum is leading her to where he believes the children are being held and casually uses the M-slur, a highly offensive slur against people with dwarfism.
“All I can tell you is that there are rumors among the servents of… something that might be kids in that room. But who knows? Maybe they’re just m*****s.” (pg. 230)
finally, the antisemitism/white supremacy (I guess that’s what it is?)
Honestly, this was just two passing lines that made me seriously uncomfortable and made me go what the fuck. Penryn meets her first female angel, who she describes as the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. Then she uses two references to H*tler’s bullshit to describe her.
1. Her cornflower blue eyes would be the perfect reflection of innocence and all that is wholesome, except that there’s something sliding behind them. Something that hints that she should be the poster child for the master race.
2. Her Aryan eyes see it all and judge me.
Like, it’s not the worst, but I really feel like “Aryan”—and especially “master race” are not terms that we should be using, like, ever. Especially not to describe “the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen”. Yes, it’s being used to imply a shiftiness about her, but it’s still being used in a way that’s synonymous with beautiful. And even if it weren’t, I feel like using it at all in any context other than educational, historical, and blatantly condemning, makes light of the atrocities done in its name. And the way Ee equates it to beauty and perfection (even if also to a potentially evil shadiness), lends a romanticization to the term that makes me viscerally uncomfortable.
Since Ee herself is Asian, this may be some kind of weird internalized racism, but it’s still very weird, exceedingly unnecessary, and really just generally problematic.
All in all, this book disgusted me. I have to admit, the general plot and lore were interesting, but the extreme ableism that was constant throughout comepletely overshadowed those positives. Penryn wasn’t an interesting or unique main character. The romance between her and Raffe had no chemistry, no spark. And every plot twist was visible from a mile away.
It’s an average book with horrifying representation. I am horrified that I can’t find anyone talking about those aspects of the book, and I’m disgusted that it ever became popular.
Last but not least: my final thoughts on Paige
Spoilers abound after this point. You have been warned.
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Seriously if you read anything after this, you cannot get mad at me for spoiling you
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay. For this to make sense, you’re going to need some context.
Remember those cannibalistic murders I mentioned before? About halfway through the book, we learn that they are being committed by these child-sized “low demons”. Penryn never gets a good look at them, but they’re all different shapes and sizes within the range of children. But they’re vicious, rabid, murderous, and cannibalistic.
When Penryn finally makes it to rescue Paige, shock of all shocks (please read that as if it was dripping in sarcasm) she has been turned into one such demon. She does seem to have some of her humanity in her. She loves Penryn, and sort of kills/eats an angel to defend her.
She can also walk.
Her legs remain smaller than they should be, due to the atrophied muscles from spending her life in a wheelchair, but she walks around without issue due to this transformation.
I wouldn’t exactly call this a miracle cure, considering she’s some creepy cannibalistic demon, but I think there is a very good chance that it will become one at the end of the series.
I feel like there are two possible outcomes:
1. Paige dies.
2. She gets turned back into a full human and is still able to walk.
I don’t really have anything against option 1. But option 2 is definitely miracle cure, and that is an inherently problematic and ableist trope. Here’s an article about this trope if you don’t understand why it is harmful: https://medium.com/the-establishment/the-miraculous-cure-trope-is-not-the-disability-representation-we-need-1608ee948349 The Miraculous Cure Is Not the Disability Representation We Need.
Ableism against mentally ill/mentally disabled people, especially those with schizophrenia and/or psychosis
Ableism against physically disabled people, especially wheel chair users, those with paralysis, and those with dwarfism—including uses of slurs such as cr*pple and m*idg*t.
Some weird romanticization of the n*zi bullshit of the “aryan race”.
Where do I start with this review? From the first chapter, the ableism was running rampant. The vast majority of the ableism in this book was against Penryn’s mother, who is, according to Ee, a paranoid schizophrenic.
I’m going to be entirely honest and say I don’t know very much about schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia specifically. However, I’d wager a bet that Susan Ee knows even less than I do.
But, hey, look at that. I did a twenty second google search. Let’s see what that says.
Question: Are people with schizophrenia dangerous?
Answer: The APA (American Psychiatric Association) says people with schizophrenia are no more likely to present dangerous or violent behavior than the general population.
so let’s get into Penryn’s mother’s portrayal, shall we?
And yet, Ee’s portrayal of a paranoid schizophrenic is exceedingly violent and deranged. Penryn’s mother suffers delusions of demons. As far as I know, that’s a pretty common delusion. At first, we simply hear of her paranoia surrounding being watched/hunted/followed/tormented by demons. That’s fair enough.
The first true issue comes in chapter 7 when Penryn’s mother desecrates a corpse. Yeah, you heard that right.
Penryn and her mom have been separated after her sister was taken. Penryn hides out in a building that has a dead body in the lobby. At one point, she goes into the lobby and finds that the body, previously laying exactly as it had fallen, has now been posed, had makeup applied sloppily to it, and has a knife through its chest that was not previously there.
“When I walk out of the corner office, I find that the dead man in the foyer has been messed with. He seems to have lost all dignity since the last time I saw him.
“Someone has arranged for one hand to be propped on his hip while the other reaches up to his hair. His long, shaggy hair has been spiked as though electrocuted, and his mouth is smeared drunkenly with lipstick. His eyes are wide open with black felt lines radiating like sun rays from his sockets. In the middle of his chest, a kitchen knife that wasn’t there an hour ago sticks out like a flagpole. Someone stabbed a dead body for reasons only the insane can fathom.
“My mother has found me.” (pg. 29)
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
I honestly don’t know what to say. I feel like this speaks for itself. This event plays no role in the plot except to showcase the fact that her mother is deranged and dangerous. It perpetuates the false idea that schizophrenia causes people to be dangerous and plays into the stereotype that they are sadistic.
A few paragraphs later, we learn that Penryn’s sister, who uses a wheelchair due to paralysis from the waist down, is disabled because of an accident. Penryn says two-year-old Paige was found laying on the floor, with her mother standing over her. No one knows what really happened, but everyone believes it was the mother in a fit of “schizophrenic violence” (which as we have already established, isn’t actually a thing).
This implication is validated even more when, in the immediate aftermath of Paige’s accident, Penryn’s mother signs her up for half a dozen different self defense classes, and Penryn finds a collections of news paper clippings her mother has kept—articles about mothers who murdered their children. When her mother sees her looking at the articles, she simply tells her to keep going to the self defense classes.
In chapter 9, Penryn, Raffe, and her mother are attacked by gang members. They get separated, and as Penryn is escaping, she comes across a body on the floor. Her mother’s handiwork, so of course it’s not just a regular old self defense stabbing.
“I find a man lying in the hallway leading to the kitchen. His chest is bare, his shirt torn away. Six butter knives stick out of his flesh in a circular pattern. Someone has drawn a powder pink lipstick pentagram with the knives at the end of the points. Blood bubbles up from each of the knives. The man is all eyes and shock as he stares at the ruin of his chest as though unable to believe it has anything to do with him.
“My mother is safe.
“Seeing what she did to this man, I can’t help but wonder if that’s a good thing. She purposefully missed his heart, and he will slowly bleed to death.” (pg. 45)
Once again. What the fuck is this.
Again, there’s no real point to her mother torturing someone except to drive home the point that she’s dangerous, sadistic, and violent. I’m all for self defense. Man attacking you in post apocalyptic world? It’s kill or be killed. But sticking him with five butter knives, purposefully aiming to give him a slow, painful death, and then drawing on his body in lipstick… The whole point of that was the shock factor, relying heavily on the false “violent schizophrenic” stereotype.
After this point, we don’t see Penryn’s mother for a while. They’ve been separated, but it appears they are both heading in the same direction, since Penryn keeps finding “gifts” from her mother (rotten eggs, they’re rotten eggs.) along the way, always next to the site of brutal murders via cannibalism. At first, Penryn believes her mother could possibly be behind the cannibalistic murders, but she also thinks the eggs might be some kind of talisman against the evil that killed these people.
After the second or third set of bodies, they learn for a fact it isn’t her mother, but the fact that it is insinuated that she could be capable of this does so much harm, regardless of the fact that it isn’t truly her in the end.
Aside from a few more rotten eggs, we don’t see Penryn’s mother until page 172. But Penryn makes sure to tell us how “crazy” and “insane” her mother is plenty of times in the interim.
When we meet up with Penryn’s mother once again, she’s gotten herself a job guarding the fence surrounding the angels’ compound. Her job is to jab anyone who gets too close with some kind of pole that electrocutes them.
“My mother is more emotional about her job than her fellow prodders. She reaches as far as the fence will let her to shock as many people as possible. At one point she even cackles as she zaps a man for as long as she can before he staggers out of her reach. She looks for all the world as though she’s enjoying inflicting pain on people.” (pg. 172)
Penryn goes on to say that her mother is just afraid. She probably doesn’t even recognize the people as people. She probably thinks she’s in a cage in Hell surrounded by monsters, and finally has a weapon to fight back.
Being trapped in a delusion is fair enough. Portraying that state as causing her mother to be violent towards other people, torturing them and seemingly enjoying it, is very much not.
For the last bit of the book, Penryn’s mother doesn’t really feature. At the very end, she escapes with Penryn, but we barely see or hear from her.
I have a feeling that, as the series progresses, we’ll learn that Penryn’s mom isn’t actually responsible for Paige’s injury, and maybe even that her demonic delusions aren’t delusions at all. This isn’t a spoiler. I have nothing to base this on other than a gut feeling.
If this does happen, you may think—oh! That makes it okay then, because she’s not actually schizophrenic, so it’s not bad rep! That would be wrong. It is still atrocious rep.
Because even if Penryn’s mother’s violence and sadistic-ness isn’t due to schizophrenia in the end (which it may still be, I don’t know), Ee still attributes violence, a sadistic nature, murder, torture, and desecration of bodies as something that it makes sense for a schizophrenic person to do. Even if her mother doesn’t have paranoid schizophrenia, the entire first book, she commits these acts while we’re told she does, and therefore are told that these acts are something that can stem from schizophrenia. This is only possible through leaning into and heavily perpetuating the false stereotype that those with schizophrenia are violent and dangerous.
next, let’s talk about Paige, and other general ableism.
I have less to say here, because most of the other ableism is much more mild. Throughout the book, Penryn constantly calls Paige crippled or a cripple. This is considered a slur. She also calls Paige “wheelchair-bound” (pg. 116), which is considered offensive. The correct term is wheelchair user, because wheelchairs are not a disabled person’s binding or prison, they are their freedom.
Penryn also regularly refers to Paige as helpless and infantilizes her. I’m not sure how much of that is simply big sister-little sister dynamics, since Paige is 7, and how much is that Ee thinks disabled people and wheelchair users are helpless. I got the feeling that it was some of both.
I have one more thing I want to say about Paige, but it is a spoiler, so I’ll put it at the very end, clearly marked as a spoiler.
At the Aerie, Penryn meets an albino angel. My feelings on him are a little complicated. Albino=evil is a very common, and very ableist, trope. And in this world, angels are the bad guys. But Josaiah seems to be a kind of good guy—maybe? I’m not sure whether or not this plays into that stereotype.
However, the way Penryn talks about and describes him is offensive. She constantly refers to him as “The Albino” which felt… squicky. She didn’t know his name, but there were other ways to refer to him. Like, her target, the albino angel or simply the angel, since he’s the only angel of importance in that scene. I’m not sure how people with albinism tend to prefer to be referred to, so I can’t truly speak on that. It just didn’t quite feel right to me.
When Penryn first sees the angel, she isn’t sure why everyone is avoiding him. She basically says that lack of pigment isn’t any more disconcerting than giant wings (which, I guess fair? But also it really shouldn’t be disconcerting at all). And then she sees his eyes.
“They are bloodred. I’ve never seen anything like it. His irises are so large they take up most of his eyes. They are balls of crimson shot through with white, like miniature lightning bolts sizzling over blood.”
“The other angels, despite all their terrible aggression, look like they were made in Heaven. This one, on the other hand, looks like he walked right out of my mother’s nightmares.” (pg. 194)
This evil looking red-eyed angel plays on the popular stereotype that all albino people have red eyes, when in fact, the vast majority simply have very light blue or gray eyes. However, some people with albinism do have eyes that appear red, whether at times or most of the time, and using this trait and equating it to looking demonic is so incredibly offensive. Again, there is no reason Josaiah must be albino, other than the shock factor. If you removed that from his character, the story would be unchanged.
While psyching herself up to go talk to Josaiah, Penryn tells the reader that she’s “used to people with unnerving physical appearances” because of all the time she spends with Paige and her disabled friends. She gives the following examples:
“Her friend Judith was born with stumpy arms and tiny, malformed hands; Alex wobbled when he walked and had to contort his face painfully to form coherent words, which often let out an embarrassing amount of drool; Will was a quadriplegic who needed a pump to keep him breathing.” (pg. 194)
These descriptions seem so mean. She points out all the “unnerving” aspects of Paige’s friends in insulting ways. Again, it’s unnecessary. Visibly disabled people aren’t side shows to laugh and gawk at. The language Ee uses is purposefully derogatory. She hopes to illicit a disgusted reaction from her readers, to show how “good of a person” Paige is for taking these kids under her wings since her disability is more socially acceptable, and to show how tolerant Penryn is that she has put up with “more than [her] fair share of hanging around people whose physical appearance is unnerving” (pg. 194).
Lastly, for this section, on page 230, Penryn’s friend Dee-Dum is leading her to where he believes the children are being held and casually uses the M-slur, a highly offensive slur against people with dwarfism.
“All I can tell you is that there are rumors among the servents of… something that might be kids in that room. But who knows? Maybe they’re just m*****s.” (pg. 230)
finally, the antisemitism/white supremacy (I guess that’s what it is?)
Honestly, this was just two passing lines that made me seriously uncomfortable and made me go what the fuck. Penryn meets her first female angel, who she describes as the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. Then she uses two references to H*tler’s bullshit to describe her.
1. Her cornflower blue eyes would be the perfect reflection of innocence and all that is wholesome, except that there’s something sliding behind them. Something that hints that she should be the poster child for the master race.
2. Her Aryan eyes see it all and judge me.
Like, it’s not the worst, but I really feel like “Aryan”—and especially “master race” are not terms that we should be using, like, ever. Especially not to describe “the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen”. Yes, it’s being used to imply a shiftiness about her, but it’s still being used in a way that’s synonymous with beautiful. And even if it weren’t, I feel like using it at all in any context other than educational, historical, and blatantly condemning, makes light of the atrocities done in its name. And the way Ee equates it to beauty and perfection (even if also to a potentially evil shadiness), lends a romanticization to the term that makes me viscerally uncomfortable.
Since Ee herself is Asian, this may be some kind of weird internalized racism, but it’s still very weird, exceedingly unnecessary, and really just generally problematic.
All in all, this book disgusted me. I have to admit, the general plot and lore were interesting, but the extreme ableism that was constant throughout comepletely overshadowed those positives. Penryn wasn’t an interesting or unique main character. The romance between her and Raffe had no chemistry, no spark. And every plot twist was visible from a mile away.
It’s an average book with horrifying representation. I am horrified that I can’t find anyone talking about those aspects of the book, and I’m disgusted that it ever became popular.
Last but not least: my final thoughts on Paige
Spoilers abound after this point. You have been warned.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Seriously if you read anything after this, you cannot get mad at me for spoiling you
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay. For this to make sense, you’re going to need some context.
Remember those cannibalistic murders I mentioned before? About halfway through the book, we learn that they are being committed by these child-sized “low demons”. Penryn never gets a good look at them, but they’re all different shapes and sizes within the range of children. But they’re vicious, rabid, murderous, and cannibalistic.
When Penryn finally makes it to rescue Paige, shock of all shocks (please read that as if it was dripping in sarcasm) she has been turned into one such demon. She does seem to have some of her humanity in her. She loves Penryn, and sort of kills/eats an angel to defend her.
She can also walk.
Her legs remain smaller than they should be, due to the atrophied muscles from spending her life in a wheelchair, but she walks around without issue due to this transformation.
I wouldn’t exactly call this a miracle cure, considering she’s some creepy cannibalistic demon, but I think there is a very good chance that it will become one at the end of the series.
I feel like there are two possible outcomes:
1. Paige dies.
2. She gets turned back into a full human and is still able to walk.
I don’t really have anything against option 1. But option 2 is definitely miracle cure, and that is an inherently problematic and ableist trope. Here’s an article about this trope if you don’t understand why it is harmful: https://medium.com/the-establishment/the-miraculous-cure-trope-is-not-the-disability-representation-we-need-1608ee948349 The Miraculous Cure Is Not the Disability Representation We Need.