After that study session, Penn grabs Luce to drag her off to the library over something she found. 

Okay, I lie, actually there’s several pages of musical characters and pointless convolutions and an entire conversation about note-passing, all of which adds nothing to the story and serves no point when in the end “Penn grabs Luce and drags her off to the library.”

Was that really so hard, book?

And also there’s more Gabbe hate, but that’s unnecessary, too.

A thin section at the front of her hair was French-braided and pinned behind her ear, like a perfect little headband. Luce stared at it jealously.

Most interesting line in the chapters so far.  Mostly because I went and tried to do that.  (I’m snowed in and bored, so sue me.)  It’s really hard to do and doesn’t look good, so if Gabbe pulled it off, I’d be jealous, too. 

Gabbe, come be my friend and French-braid my hair!

Anyway, part of Penn’s excitement is she found a piece of paper in Miss Sophia’s handwriting, which lists Cam, Luce, Gabbe, and Todd with a note “all from the Northeast” (wow, very descriptive) and Daniel, Arriane, and Molly as all from LA.  The two groups of kids all arrived three years apart.  The girls think this information is as odd as I do.  Not because it is, itself, odd, but because it’s a weird thing to have noted down on a piece of paper randomly.

Molly’s name was Mary Margaret? “No wonder she’s so pissed off at the world,”

…what’s wrong with Mary Margaret?  It’s a perfectly fine name.

Also, Miss Sophia arrived at the same time as Molly’s group.

The other bit of something that Penn found was a book in the library.

Grigori, D. The Watchers: Myth in Medieval Europe. Seraphim Press, Rome, 1755.

Ow, ow, ow, ow, too many angel references in one place, it’s too much!

Okay, I was letting the Grigori thing go before now.  Sure, it’s obvious and hamfisted and painful to us readers, and yes I know Luce is supposed to be “smart,” but Luce doesn’t know she’s in an angel book.  Maybe she’s smart about stuff other than mythology and never came across “grigori” before.  And never read an urban fantasy before.  Those people exist.  And it’s not like it’s common practice to try and translate the last name of your crush.

But at the point where they’re actually looking this much into him, it should have come up.  I mean, that book is basically “The Watchers, by The Watcher, via The Watchers Press, Watchers central.”  You could look up any one of those things and in the process realize that it’s the same as all the rest.

If you want to throw out random symbolic names, fine, but at the point where characters are looking things up, you have to remember that those words still mean things.

“He told me studying religion was in his family. This must be what he meant.”

“I thought he was an orphan—”

???  Orphans have ancestors.  And a lot of times they know about them.  It’s not like 100% of them were orphaned as infants and then left nameless on some church steps.

And then there’s boy talk on the way to the library to go check out the Watcher Watcher Watcher Watcher book.

BTW, notice that it’s Penn who is the one driving this plot forward.  She (so far as we know) has no investment in Cam, Daniel, or Luce’s relationship with either of them, but she’s the one who’s coming up with snooping plans and gathering information and dragging Luce around to go look at it.  Left to her own devices, Luce would sit on her bed all day and stare at the ceiling until her brain turned to mush.  And this is the heroine we’re stuck with.

As they’re looking for the book, a shadow shows up, and it’s lighter in color than all the previous ones.  Luce manages to knock it away by merely swinging her arm through it.  I continue to be completely unimpressed with these shadows and their lack of badassery.

A cold, sick feeling grew in her gut when she realized that what she’d started doing to the shadows was more like … fighting them off.

I still want to know what the hell she was doing with them before.  Although I suspect the answer will be “jack shit nothing because fuck you.”  Worst monsters ever.

The Watcher Squared book is missing.

Wow, we’re just making so much progress, aren’t we?

Luce spends an entire page wondering things about Daniel.  Not kidding.  An entire page of “She wanted to know whether Daniel had ever read this book by his ancestor and what he’d thought about it, and if he liked writing himself.”  I said I wouldn’t complain about romance being romance, but this isn’t romance.  Romance requires…you know, actual interaction between two actual people.  Not one person sitting around thinking a lot.

She pulled the first book off the shelf—the very unfascinating cloth-covered Dictionary of Angels—and decided to distract herself by reading until Penn came back.

She’d gotten as far as the fallen angel Abbadon,

God damnit, Luce, you couldn’t even skip to the W’s out of idle curiosity?  You are fucking useless.

The fire alarm goes off.

They’d done this kind of thing at Dover all the time. After a while, it had reached the point where not even the teachers had heeded the monthly fire drills,

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.  No, the fancy prep school full of rich kids does not have teachers who blithely ignore fire alarms.  Because the teachers – in any school that isn’t a fake reform school dumping ground – who ignore fire alarms get fucking fired.

No, I reject your shitty-ass bullhokey.  You cannot make me believe that.

This time, though, the library actually is on fire.

Luce starts having a panic attack because the last time she was in a fire a guy died, and Todd (he was hanging around before) pops up to help her get out through a rear exit.  They get stuck in a back hallway with lots of shadows in between them and the outside door, and apparently Todd can see them because he starts freaking out. But then something comes by and carries them both out the pitch-dark shadow-filled hallway and through the exit door.

A pulsing, almost violet column of light hovering over them. It made Luce think, absurdly, of Daniel.

Because of course.

And then she passes out.

Because of course.