Recently, a friend asked me if I had stopped doing these recaps. And I was like, yeah, I had to, because they were putting my dog to sleep. But I was just kidding. I’m hilarious like that.<\/p>\n
Anyway, no I haven’t stopped, and I’m not going to stop, because I’m over halfway done with this, and there’s no sense in putting myself through the first 66% of the book and not finishing. It would be like letting a Civil War surgeon on a dirty battlefield half amputate my leg and then just leave the job unfinished.<\/p>\n
A word of caution here: due to recent injury, I’m using dictation software to write this recap. So some stuff will probably look weird, and I will likely not catch it when I edit. It’s just my luck.<\/p>\n
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So, where we last left Rory, she had just found a dead body inside the crashed spaceship, and she’s afraid it’s Cy.<\/p>\n
I felt over the rest of the body. The clothes were slick and tight fitting, not at all like Cy’s jeans and shirt. What was left of the hair was very short and spiky, different from Cy’s soft waves and curls. Exhausted in every way possible, my body collapsed against the wall, and I cried quietly, covering my face with my clean hand. It wasn’t him. Cy could still be alive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Writing Tip:<\/strong> here’s a very common mistake. Word repetition. It happens to everyone, but sometimes it’s easily avoidable. You just have to be able to see it. Here, it’s pretty visible: “I felt over the rest of the body<\/span>.” “[…] my body<\/span> collapsed against the wall [\u2026]”. If you switch the second instance from “my body” to “I”, you solve the problem.<\/p>\n
Cy was hurt somewhere in a strange ship, and Benji was outside, either captured or dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
is the ship strange to Cy? It’s from his home planet, and it’s kind of like his girlfriend’s car, right? At the very least, Cy would have some kind of knowledge of what a spaceship is and how it might be laid out. He’s a space traveler himself, after all.<\/p>\n
Rory thinks about how she ran away “like a coward.” If I recall correctly, she actually ran away like an idiot, straight into the spaceship that had just crashed. She thinks about how she isn’t brave and can’t save anybody, then she crawls over a bunch of bodies and into what she thinks is a control room.<\/p>\n
“Cy?” I called out just loud enough for someone close to here, hoping I hadn’t missed his body in the black corridor. I stood up. My entire body complained.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Maguire should’ve complained about the shoddy job her proofer did. Two more “body”s on the same page, and a “bodies” I didn’t quote. She really deserves her money back on this.<\/p>\n
My arm was covered in warm blood \u2014 my own. The rest of me was covered in the blood of others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
By some miracle, she doesn’t tack on something about her inconsistent near-or-possibly-full murder.<\/p>\n
I leaned against a desk, beyond exhausted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thanks for reiterating that, because you haven’t been exhausted for like four entire chapters now and I was worried you were getting your second wind.<\/p>\n
I had wandered too far away from the point of the explosion. It wasn’t likely that Cy had gotten this far inside the ship in that amount of time. Rendlesham and the soldiers might have already captured him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This, like so many things in this book, makes absolutely no sense. Cy was on the ship before her. Why is it unlikely that he got on the ship before her, but hasn’t made it as far as she has? Why is it likely that Rendlesham, who was outside the ship when Rory got on it, somehow got ahead of her to find Cy? or maybe she means that between Cy getting on the ship and the explosion happening, he wouldn’t have been able to get as far away from the blast zone as she did? But that still doesn’t make sense, because Cy\u00a0could’ve just gone a different direction.<\/p>\n
I was alone in a dark busted ship, tripping over dead bodies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But not corpses, victims, casualties, dead aliens, crew members\u2026 Look, I would understand if it was a word like “parasite” or “alien”, because there aren’t a lot of suitable substitutes, so the author has to repeat those words. There’s no way of avoiding the repetition. But here there is, so it really sticks out.<\/p>\n
Rory hears somebody speaking in a different language, and then she hears Cy’s voice.<\/p>\n
I turned, seeing Cy and his betrothed. Apolonia was holding a sword to my throat. She was breathtaking. Her skin was a bit lighter than Cy’s, and her long black hair fell in soft waves to her elbows. It was propped up somehow from the underside and then left to cascade over like a waterfall. She had two thick braids running across the top of her head and a heavy red stripe running across both of her eyes and nose, from temple to temple, making her pale blue eyes \u2014 that were just a few shades away from white \u2014 look even brighter. Her curve-hugging crimson uniform didn’t leave much to the imagination, showing her toned shoulders, arms, and add, and she was almost as tall as Cy. She looked both futuristic and savage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Okay. The warrior from the culture that mimics a real-world culture of people of color is “savage”.<\/p>\n
She could be in a workout commercial or a hair commercial or a lipstick commercial,<\/span> I thought as I noticed her shimmering plump lips. My day just got much worse.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She could be in a workout commercial or a hair commercial or lipstick commercial or a commercial for my latent bisexuality. (Insert routine author note about underlines indicating italics).<\/p>\n
So, remember how Rory’s human friends might be dead right now? And how she’s on a crashed spaceship, crawling over dead bodies? And how the fate of the entire world rests on her shoulders because some devastating alien parasite might consume the human race? But a girl being prettier than her, makes the day so much worse.<\/i><\/p>\n
Cy warns Rory not to make any sudden movements, then he says something to Apolonia and she responds in their language. Cy tells her to speak English.<\/p>\n
“English feels unpleasant in my mouth,” she replied. She spoke my language but awkwardly and with a severe accent. It made her seem less frightening even though she was looking at me like she wanted to take my life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s important that we know that the scary savage’s accent is severe, because it helps keep her scary, but less so because she’s speaking English. Okay.<\/p>\n
“Put down your weapon, Apolonia,” Cy commanded. He spoke much harsher than he had ever spoken to me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because he likes you more than he likes his fianc\u00e9e. We get it.<\/p>\n
Cy asks Rory what she saw on the way there, and you guessed it, she says she saw dead bodies. There’s also a line where she thinks about every muscle in her body relaxing, so now “body” is less of a word rep and more of a motif. Cy tells Rory to hide under a desk and not to come out until he tells her to. Then he and Apolonia make a run for it, but not real fast, because Cy is injured. Though I know it wasn’t the impression the author intended to give, it kind of seems like Cy just shoves Rory under a desk in a bid to save himself.<\/p>\n
Before Cy and Apolonia can get away, Dr. Rendlesham arrives with some soldiers. Apolonia stares them down while Cy tries to warn them:<\/p>\n
“Doctor, call off your men. She will kill them. And you.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So…why not just let her. If Rendlesham is dead, he can’t do the thing with the parasite, right?<\/p>\n
Because this book is this book, the tense stand-off goes on way too long. Rendlesham tells him they have five AK-47s aimed at her, and Cy is all, let your men go home to their families, and Rendlesham is like, I’m giving you one more chance, and Cy again tries with the think-of-your-kids-back-home thing, and Rendlesham tells a soldier to take the shot, but the soldier hesitates, blah blah blah. Writing Tip:\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0If you’re trying to write a tense gun-battle stand off scene,\u00a0every dialogue exchange sucks some of the tension out. That’s what happens here. It goes from a stand-off to a conversation that’s happening\u00a0while weapons politely try to not eavesdrop. After a few lines of back and forth, the reader begins to doubt that anyone is going to do anything at all.<\/p>\n
As it happens, a soldier does end up firing his gun. He shoots Cy, which is the wrong thing to do, because Apolonia’s eyes go all black. She unsheathes her sword and deflects the bullets the soldiers fire at her with the blade. But she doesn’t kill Rendlesham. Then more soldiers run in.<\/p>\n
Her eyes lacked compassion or fear. Her flawlessness revealed that she wasn’t human, but her eyes exposed her inhumanity. I didn’t imagine any of these men wanted to spar with her. That much beauty with that much malevolence was unsettling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Raise your hand if the combination of “savage” and “non-english-speaking” and “inhuman” are hitting all kinds of buttons here.
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