Juliette spends her whole shower scoffing at the idea of being bribed.

Warner doesn’t seem to understand that I grew up with nothing

Bullshit, a couple of chapters ago you were going on about Christmas trees and movies.

Then she goes on about how she doesn’t want fancy stuff, just human companionship, and also books are awesome.

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting sick of book-loving main characters?  I get that if we’re reading, we probably like it, so character who also likes to read is an easy point of connection.  But it’s been done so much that it sort of feels lazy now. 

I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

I know that’s supposed to be a metaphor, but I’m amused because it’s not.  We’ve finally hit on her saying something literally true.

They want to delete every point of punctuation in my life from this earth and I don’t think I can let that happen.

How do you know this?  Because they gave you a nice room?

Ugh, her complaints are just so endless and constant.  We don’t have enough time between stuff like this to build up any sort of context.  We’ll get a little bit of stuff happening, and then pages and pages of Juliette whining about it.  The weird part is, things are set up to be dystopian, which means whining about it should be perfectly valid.  Not enough food for your people, but your government is full of ineffective shitheads?  That’s whine-worthy!  So this should be okay, but because we don’t get enough details to offset the whining, it comes off as melodramatic instead. 

The way to make a fictional world horrifying is to SHOW US THE HORROR, not whine about how horrible it is.  Let us come to our own conclusions about it.  This is just a really flowery form of telling.

The sky is raining bricks right into my skull.

If only, sweetie. If only.

Juliette decides to wear her old clothes instead of dress up and they finally head down to dinner.

This is what this book has reduced me to.  I actually thing “going to dinner” counts as progress.

The dining room is big enough to feed thousands of orphans.

Really?  I had no idea that orphans ate architecture.

She sits next to Warner and dithers on about that for a while.

Hate looks just like everybody else until it smiles. Until it spins around and lies with lips and teeth carved into the semblance of something too passive to punch.

I had to read that and so do you.

Juliette refuses food and tells Warner not to call her “love” after he encourages her to eat.

Warner decides to respond by randomly shooting his gun.

Because…yeah, that makes so much sense.

I… I just don’t even.  He issues her a verbal threat right after, so okay, I get it’s a threat, but why shoot someone’s dinner?  It really is that random. 

They all eat and Warner walks her back to her room.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” Warner says as we make our way toward the elevator. “I’m only your enemy if you want me to be.”

Well then stop shooting stuff.

You know, I still don’t know who the fuck this guy is or where he came from or what he wants or what his role in anything is.  Is he a peon?  Is in charge of something?  A country, a garrison, a company, a team?  What gives him the authority to shower her with fancy clothes?  He wants her to use her touch-y power thing , which we also don’t know shit about, but that’s it.  Who is he?

Warner wants a demonstration of what her touch can do, and Juliette won’t touch him.  So he calls a random solider over and tells him to “escort” Juliette to her room and not let go of her the whole way.  So Juliette runs.

She does get far, though, and she’s cornered a few paragraphs later.  That same soldier gets set to touch her, even though he…I think knows what’s going to happen?  Either way, he’s not happy about doing it.

It’s honestly hard to tell what happens after that, because who the fuck knows what’s a metaphor and what’s not in this book.  I think she’s sucking his soul out, or energy, or something.  She’s basically Rogue from X-Men, which means the author didn’t even do anything new with this. 

It hurts him but feels good to her.

Juliette flips out and gets out of his grip, but he’s already on the ground and wheezing/jerking, so she starts screaming at people to help him.

At least she’s not a sociopath.

Then Warner knocks her unconscious again.  Maybe.  Either that or she spontaneously passes out.  Kind of hard to tell.

Which, really, it’s a bad sign when I can’t figure out the basic actions going on in a story.