"This Motherless Land", "Iron Flame" part 1

[fiefoe]

I would have liked this novel a bit better, had Nikki May's publisher not decided that the novel's selling point is its (truly tenuous) likeness to "Mansfield Park."

• Mum said jealousy was the most evil thing in the world (which was stupid; everyone knew it was armed robbers). She acted as if a squabble could turn into hatred if you weren’t careful, so Funke tried not to moan about things being unfair, even when they clearly were. Femi was annoying but she didn’t hate him, she loved him. It wasn’t his fault he was Dad’s favourite – it was a boy thing.
• Every Crown School teacher had a preferred approach to corporal punishment – sharp end of ruler against knuckle was the most popular, but Monsieur Pottison preferred the head konk and Mrs Mehta was mistress of the ear twist.
• Boniface dropped the cutlass and did a full dobale – bending double, left arm behind his back, touching the floor with his right hand. Dad said prostrating was bush, but Funke had the feeling he secretly liked it – he always stood straighter when he was bowed to.
• The necklace had been Mum’s eighteenth birthday present from her parents. She’d chosen it herself – the pearls had spoken to her (Mum often had conversations with inanimate objects).
• * They called each other ‘darling’, drank Campari and wore lots of make-up. Their husbands were like Dad, Nigerians who had studied abroad and brought some of it back with them. They had Jimmy Cliff-style Afros instead of trimmed buzz cuts and wore pastel short-sleeved safari suits instead of native. They used big words and over-pronounced them – ‘blowing phonetics’ was how Oyinkan described it – and constantly dropped in references to their time overseas.
• ‘I don’t do God’ was yet another of Mum’s sayings, almost worse than ‘I don’t do sun’. Funke wasn’t allowed to ‘do God’ either, not until she was old enough to make ‘an informed choice’. She was desperate to do God – everyone else did.
• ‘Lucky?’ Funke grabbed the bottle top from her pocket and clenched her fist around it. The sharp, ridged edges dug into her palm. The physical pain was a relief.
• Funke escaped to her room and her growing collection of treasures. Femi’s Action Man had been joined by her mother’s battered gardening hat, a single yellow cork-heeled platform, a spiky Clairol roller.
• ‘She said Funke was laughing.’ Her father rubbed his eyes. ‘How can she laugh at a time like this? It’s true: she must be possessed.’
• ‘God, no,’ Mummy had laughed. ‘If you were adopted, I’d have returned you years ago. Do you think I’d make all these sacrifices if I didn’t have to?’
• the view was still blurry, as if the clouds were floating on the ground. It was raining half-heartedly. Funke was used to big noisy drops which soaked you in seconds... The curtains were thick and heavy, as if their job was to trap the gloom. The carpet on the stairs wasn’t wide enough.
• The bath was weird – dark blue on the outside, it sat in the middle of the room on feet shaped like vulture’s claws. The taps were in the wrong place, at the centre of the long side, and the plughole was in the middle.
• Funke trailed after Liv, trying to make sense of her convoluted and obviously made-up dream. One of Mum’s favourite sayings flashed through her head: That one can talk for England. At last it made sense.
• NEPA never took light – five whole days and not one power cut. Their sun didn’t work properly – it never got hot and it rose and set at the wrong times... In Lagos, you turned lights on to celebrate NEPA working. Here, Grandma got cross if Liv flicked the switch before it was pitch-dark.
• They live in each other’s pockets.’ <> Not quite, thought Funke. It wasn’t reciprocal. Liv was carrying her.
• * SHE’S UNCIVILIZED RANG IN Funke’s skull. It was another word for bush – her father said it about Boniface often enough. So this was why they spoke slowly and used easy words. Why they looked at her with tilted heads and raised eyebrows. It wasn’t sympathy; it was superiority.
• Meanwhile, Dominic the mumu was treated like a prince. It was almost a relief to realize some things – like boys being more important than girls – were the same in Nigeria and England.
• ‘I think she likes moaning. All old people do. Grandpa’s always talking about inflation – it’s why Dominic can’t have a horse and why I can’t board. Did you have inflation in Africa?’
  ‘Yes. Dad said it was the government’s fault.’
  ‘That’s exactly what Grandpa thinks! He said Labour’s not working.’
• Funke’s hair had never been brushed and the bristles of Liv’s Kent hairbrush caught on every tangle, yanking knotted clumps from the roots. Funke gritted her teeth, clenched her fists and dug bitten nails into scarred palms.
• Liv sashayed into the cinema: long strides, back straight, core tight, game-face on. This was what she’d come to London for.
• But Mrs Stewart’s Africa was on a different planet. The lesson was all about some man called Mungo Park, who, according to her, had discovered Nigeria. <> ‘But it was always there,’ said Kate.
• * ‘It’s normally fifteen hundred – that’s the going rate for posh girls. But you had to tell us about your famous granddad, didn’t you? So it’s double. Three grand, OK?’ Clinton’s accent was no longer American. Now he sounded like what he was: a cheap hustler. Except not cheap.
• She couldn’t help but smile when Grandma asked Dominic to leave too. He stomped off, face like a side of ham, florid and sweaty.
• ‘You’ve got to take it off. Now. If Mummy sees it, she’ll hit the roof. I pawned her pearls. I had to. Please, Kate. If she sees yours, I’ll have to tell her everything. And I can’t.’
  ‘You pawned your mother’s necklace? Seriously? Liv?’
  ‘I had no choice. You weren’t going to help me. What was I supposed to do? Stop giving me your goody-two-shoes look. We can’t all be bloody perfect.’
• ‘You’ll say you were driving, yeah?’ Dominic didn’t move. A vein throbbed in his neck. ‘You have to say you were driving.’ <> ‘Yes!’ Kate pushed at his chest. ‘Now go!’
• ‘Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?’ The officer slammed his hands on the table. ‘Drug possession, intent to supply, driving under the influence, driving without a licence. And Mr Stone says you didn’t have permission to take Lord Stone’s car, so we can add theft to the list.’
• It turned out her father had left a lot out of the letters he hadn’t written. A new house, a new wife and two new children, Femi and Funmi. He hadn’t wasted much time grieving. Kate had been gone for eight years and two months. Femi was seven.
• Supper was a brown ball surrounded by a moat of red stew and a dam of viscous green sauce. Amala and okro. She knew what it was but had never eaten it. Mum used to say amala tasted of mud and Femi said okro looked like snot.
• During the day, she stayed in her room, dozing fitfully. She communicated in shrugs, head-shakes and nods. She thought of her first days at The Ring and wondered if her body’s way of coping with unendurable situations was to turn off the sound.
• ‘Who the fuck are you looking at?’ Kate’s ghost demanded angrily. <> ‘Sorry.’ Liv swallowed. She wasn’t even a good ghost – too tall, nose all wrong, no gap in her front teeth – but the encounter winded her.
• It turned out the reply had arrived two days before. He’d been waiting for her to be strong enough to read it. Which was ridiculous – superhuman power wouldn’t have been enough to withstand the rejection.
• * Funke knew it was humiliating for her father to accept she’d rather live with the Bensons than with him. He was a proud man – too proud, maybe. But he’d learned from his mistakes and they reached a kind of truce. She refused to take the Stones’ £10,000 hush money, though, told him to send it back. Liv had her legacy. She had hers. Pride trumped prejudice.
• * Funke’s eyes welled. She’d searched that motherless land in vain, looked for Mum all over The Ring, tried to find her by the lightning tree, sought her out at the folly. But she’d been in Lagos all along. In Billy’s squawk. In this waiter’s voice.
• Months later, when they got to the cadaver’s stomach, they found she’d died of a perforated ulcer; the rugae pattern in her pyloric region left no room for doubt. ‘Na wa o! You were right,’ Bola said admiringly. ‘Maggot died of bad belle.’
• * The need to be deferential to anyone in authority; no comebacks, no conversation. Students were expected to act like half-wits; head down, timid, compliant. And calling people ‘ma’ and ‘sah’ or ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’ took a lot of getting used to,
• The twitching yanked her back to memories she’d spent years trying to escape. Her usual tricks – drowning the guilt in alcohol, frying it with cocaine, numbing it with weed, crushing it with sex – seemed to have stopped working.
• When she slipped on an exposed root and her grandmother righted her, she realized it was the other way round – her grandmother’s arm was there to keep her up.
• ‘Yes, I was.’ Funke knew this was true. Her mother had saved her life. She’d got where she was thanks to the people her mother had touched. Not just Mum’s friends, like Aunty Ndidi and Aunty Chloé, but the hundreds of people in Lagos who remembered Misses Lissie. The children she’d taught, their parents, the waiters at Ikoyi Club she’d smiled at, the gatemen she’d waved to. A month couldn’t pass without someone realizing she was Misses Lissie’s daughter; invariably it was a passport to special treatment. Maybe Dad was right: she should embrace every aspect of her mother’s legacy, including the money. She was her mother’s daughter. It was her birthright.
• The Bodyguard. She blubbed her way through it and spent the rest of the flight thinking how refreshing it was that Kevin being white and Whitney being Black didn’t even get a mention. It could only happen in Hollywood.
• In Nigeria, women were supposed to be married, knocked up and locked down by twenty-five. Toks could protect her from being single-shamed and from unwanted male attention. And she could protect him from stigma and unwanted female attention. It was a no-brainer. ‘Yes,’ she said.
• The camera panned the crowd in the packed stadium. And there was Kate’s ghost: smiling, that gap in her front teeth, her smooth intelligent forehead. Her hair was different, little bunches all over her head. She looked beautiful. And happy. The camera pulled back. It is Kate! Liv was sure of it. Her Kate. Draped in a Nigerian flag.
• * On day three, it dawned on her how unremarkable she was. Everyone there was struggling. Most of them had more reason than her – they’d taken more drugs, drunk more booze, hurt more people, suffered more grief. She wasn’t special. In fact, she was intensely boring. <> On day five, her self-obsession started to grate. Even on her.
• * Thirty minutes of being browbeaten and listening to her grumble. Liv had let her mother down by being too fat then too thin; too wild then too boring; too loud then too quiet. Each week her mother picked a specific failing to interrogate. <> Liv always did something else while talking to her. Jojo had suggested it, called it ‘distraction therapy’; he used it to help children cope with painful procedures.
• It was a running joke that Liv’s men fell into two distinct camps. Type one, Gammon, wore brogues with coloured cords, spoke with long vowels and worked in the City; Alexander (Stinky to his closest friends) was archetypical. Type two, Spam, wore trainers and ripped jeans, said very little and worked even less. Both types treated Liv badly.
• Kunle added thick batons of yam to oil. She couldn’t hide her surprise when he poured boiling water into the pan and covered it. ‘You put water in chips!’ she exclaimed.
• there, in the tiny kiosk, surrounded by brands she didn’t recognize, she found her first glimpse of Kate. The packaging was exactly as she’d described: a glossy red wrapper with thin gold lines on the crimped edges. Goody Goody. Kate had sworn it was nicer than any of the sweets in England. Liv bought a whole box
• * Professor Tinuke Soyege was a large woman, strong rather than fat, with a majestic air. She was wearing a floor-length cream kaftan covered in russet and green circles, each circle made out of geometric dots, like mandalas. Her jet-black hair was rigid and wig-like, the colour too uniform to be real. It reminded Liv of her mother’s helmet-like hairdo.
• Old habits die hard, and she was still a chameleon. She thought of herself as a matryoshka doll, multitudes of different Funkes, Kates and Katherines all stacked inside her. She used to wonder if there was a real version locked away in her core but she’d stopped searching long ago.
• And, of course, NEPA chose that exact moment to restore power. All the lights came on, lighting them up like a Christmas tree. And to celebrate her misfortune, the neighbourhood let out a collective cheer.
  ‘Why?’ demanded Liv. ‘I deserve an explanation for what you’ve put me through. It’s the least you can do. Go on, Kate. Tell me why.’
  Put you through! Blood pounded in Funke’s ears. She stabbed a finger in Liv’s face. ‘My name is Funke. And that necklace belongs to me.’
• * She’d always known her mother was manipulative and bitter, but this went beyond that. To keep up the lie that Kate – Funke, she corrected herself – was dead. To watch your own child tear herself apart, suffer for all those years. That took malice.
• It was hard to decide which was worse: the neurotic mothers upset that their sensitive flower had survived without them or the psychotic mothers up in arms that their two-year-old prodigy hadn’t mastered multiplication yet. But this first day was worse than usual. Liv was exhausted and every encounter with a panicky mum intensified her already intense anxiety. Were mothers to blame for everything that went wrong?
• * She used to be such a free spirit, fearless, full of hope and positivity. Now she was nervous, hesitant. Smaller. I am the lucky one – I had Misses Lissie. A dead mother who was good trumped a live mother who fucked you up.
  Funke pumped her arms, trying to figure out Margot’s motive. Because she was jealous of her dead sister? To save Dominic? Prejudice? Or for forty thousand pounds? It didn’t add up. Too much hatred, too little justification.
  And Funke had colluded with her, which made it worse. Margot had got away with it because she’d given her the whip hand. Funke could have stayed, called her bluff, put up a fight...  Why had she been so ready to believe she would lose? She was her own worst enemy; her biggest oppressor was in the mirror.
  ‘It’s the why,’ said Funke. ‘The reason Margot made me dead. Unbelievable. It wasn’t racism. It was greed.’ <> ‘Same thing, though, isn’t it?’ Oyinkan scrunched up the empty paper wrapper. ‘Humans are inherently greedy. They hate sharing. So they invented racism to justify keeping all the cake.  Don’t give them a slice, they don’t deserve it, they’re too dark. Or too gay. Or too short. Any difference will do: sex, colour, tribe, religion, whatever. I’m yet to meet a good “ism”.’

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Sorry to say that Rebecca Yarros's follow-up to "The Fourth Wing" is a thudding disappointment.

• I let anger rush to the surface in hopes it will burn away the heartrending pain of his words. Brennan’s been lying to me for six years, letting me mourn his death when he’s been well-the-fuck alive the whole time. My oldest friend stole my memories and possibly sent me to die. My mother built my entire life on a lie. I’m not even sure what parts of my education are real and which are fabricated, and he thinks I’m not going to demand total, complete honesty from him?
• “Go straight to hell,” she whispers. “And I really mean that. I hope no one commends your soul to Malek. I hope he rejects it. Liam was worth a dozen of your kind, and I hope you spend eternity paying for what you cost me, what you cost all of us.”
  Yep, that look in her eyes is definitely hatred.
  My heart abandons my body and lands somewhere in the vicinity of her recommendation.
• “The first year is when some of us lose our lives,” he says softly, tucking my damp hair behind my ear. “The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity. It’s all part of the process of turning us into effective weapons
• “People are trying to kill you?” Jesinia’s brow knits.
  “It’s Thursday.”
• Her face turns a mottled shade of red. “You’d keep my brother’s letters from me? If they still exist, they’re mine. You really are a piece of work.”
  “In this case, I think Liam would more than approve.” I shrug. “It’s up to you, Sloane. Show up, train, live, and get a letter a week. Or don’t.”
• “You don’t have to freeze out everyone you can’t be completely honest with just because Riorson thinks that works for him—it doesn’t, hence all of your issues, and it damn well looks like your friend needs you, so go.”
• There’s a group of riders in the courtyard behind Xaden, but they’re only a blur of black because I can’t look away from him, can’t see past him. As complicated as our connection is, it’s also undeniably simple. He’s the horizon, and nothing exists beyond for me.
• I nod. “No one is supposed to know.”
  “I can keep a secret, Violet.” Hurt flashes across her features, and I feel another thread of our friendship unravel as though I’d pulled it myself.
• My thighs tremble, and at the next thrust, I fracture with a cry. Lightning flashes, power tearing through me with instant thunder as the waves crest over me again and again. All I can do is hold on to Xaden and ride them out, bliss flooding my body until I’m too limp to rock back against him.
• Shit. What is this? Jealousy? Anxiety? Insecurity?
  “All three,” Tairn responds in utter annoyance. “To which I will remind you that not a single dragon chose her. You were selected by two. Pull yourself together.”
  His metric is sound but has little to do with what I’m feeling.
• “Holy shit!” My jaw drops, then rises in an awestruck smile. “You just pulled that through the wall! I thought you couldn’t do that yet!”
  “I can’t!” she rebuts. “Well, couldn’t, I guess. Not until right now. Not until I thought whatever this is had a chance of getting you killed from the look you gave me.”
• Everyone thinks most Riders cadets die from dragon fire. Truth be told, it’s usually gravity that gets us. —PAGE FORTY-SEVEN, THE BOOK OF BRENNAN
• “Well, that death was kind of a second chance for me. You don’t know who you really are until you face down Malek. So, the way I see this is I just gave you a second chance, too. We’re even.” He nods once, then walks away, exiting into the tower.
• “‘In the storage of ancient documents,’” I recite from the Scribe Manual, “‘it is not only temperature and touch that must be monitored—’”
  “Glad to see you haven’t changed that much.” Aaric’s mouth curves into the first smile I’ve seen from him in years.
  “‘—but light.’” I glance up. “‘Light will steal ink’s pigment and crack the leather of spine and cover.’”
  “One time, I heard her recite the entire unification agreement while climbing the battlements in Calldyr,” Aaric notes, moving to the top of the next bookcase.
  Light. They’d have to be hidden from light. I start searching for track marks in the floor that might signal another hidden door, or cubby, or something.
• He crouches, looking at me like I’m a shiny new toy he can’t wait to break.
• Life is varying degrees of pain, but Liam never leaves. He’s there every time I open my eyes, watching, talking me through the torture, holding my sanity together while simultaneously proving it’s already left.
• They’ve kept us in the dark, erased our very history to avoid conflict, to keep us safe while innocent people die.
  Liam— Gods...Liam. I dig my mental fingernails into Dain and hold him there, making him feel it with me again, the helplessness. The chest-crushing sorrow. The eye-blurring rage.
• Xaden’s hand wraps around mine, and he jabs forward, driving the blade into Varrish’s heart. I memorize the look on Varrish’s face as the life fades out of him, just so I can reassure myself that he’s really dead when the nightmares inevitably come.
• “You of all people know the lengths I’ll go to in order to protect her. And since I’m pretty sure you’re the reason we’re getting reports of dragons dropping wyvern carcasses at every outpost we have along our border, the reason this college is emptying itself of most of the leadership in a rush to contain the problem, the least you can do is give me a chance to say goodbye to her.”
  “You what?” My gaze swings to Xaden’s, but he keeps his locked on my mother.
  “Would have done it sooner, but it took a couple of days to hunt them down and kill them,” Xaden replies to her.
  “You’ve threatened our entire kingdom.” Her eyes narrow.
  “Good. You allowed her to be tortured for days. I don’t give a shit whether it was by your absence or your negligence. It happened on your watch.”
• She tilts her head to look me in the eye. “It was a simple transaction. He wanted the marked ones to have a chance. I gave him the quadrant—as long as he took responsibility for them—in return for a favor to be named at a later date. You were that favor. If you survived Parapet on your own, all he had to do was see that no one killed you outside of challenges or your own naivete your first year, which he did. Quite a miracle, considering what Colonel Aetos put you through during War Games.”