Luce gets a visit from her parents on Parent’s Day, and she immediately launches into a guilt trip asking why they didn’t take her home from the hospital.  Her parents say because she was physically fit, adjusting well and back in class, and all the professionals said this was the best thing to do.

Luce admits that this is logical, but in the same breath claims it’s all just so unfair because her life is soooooo hard.

And…we’ve gotten to the point in the book where I don’t know which way to turn.  Because, objectively, her life is hard.  She’s been through shit with doctors trying to “cure” her “hallucinations,” she’s hounded by shadow monsters, she’s seen (or close to it) two boys die and had to deal with survivor’s guilt from both, she’s getting jerked around by a manipulative guy, and she’s in a really shitty school.  I mean, more shitty than usual, criminally shitty.  On the other hand, all of these issues are so poorly handled that I find it hard to care.  Luce doesn’t respond to these events appropriately.  All her thoughts and reactions are those of a normal teenager going through a normal amount of teenaged angst.  On an emotional level, I’m just not connecting with her hardships, which makes me want to roll my eyes and mock her.  Add to that the fact that she’s basically useless, and I just want to roll my eyes harder.  I have a really hard time feeling bad for someone who just sits there.  I can have sympathy for someone beaten down, jaded, worn into submission, because they’ve tried before and it got them nowhere and they’re just tired of trying.  That’s sympathetic.  But Luce’s listless “whatever” attitude, coupled with the lack of any evidence that she has tried in the past, coupled with how fucking easy these “monsters” are to brush off when she does try, all together does not make me feel bad for her.

The shitty writing has turned what should be a legitimately sympathetic situation into pathetic instead.

Luce tells her parents that the school is bad, but that’s all she says about it.  Not a word on the lack of oversight, the drunken parties in the student dorms, the fistfights in the lunch room, the fact that they think shock collars bracelets are an appropriate control measure, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of counseling going on…nope, she just says “This place is an absolute joke,” and then without any further comment they all go on a picnic, where the only bad thoughts Luce has about her school all center on how ugly it is.  Again.

See?  When all she says is what any teenager would say about any school, I can’t really feel bad for her.  For all I know, neither she nor the book see that above paragraph as even being a problem, much less one to complain about.

All the other kids are having, apparently, perfectly pleasant times with their various families.  You know, for as much as this book wants to hammer in how terrible the school is, every time we get a sweeping description of what all the kids are up to, they seem to be rather idyllic.

God, this whole parents day is interminable.  Luce sneers at everything her school tries to do while there’s much overblown descriptions of things and her friends act eccentric.  Penn, Arriane, and Cam all get their episodes, while failing to do anything actually interesting.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Oh, I guess that’s not true.  Cam is arguing with someone that the text awkwardly “hints” is too young to really be his dad, but then they both leave after making small talk with Luce’s family.

Luce thought about what Daniel had suggested—quite strongly—the other day. That maybe she shouldn’t be at Sword & Cross at all. And suddenly she wanted so badly to bring it up to her parents, to beg and plead for them to take her far away from here.

But it was that same memory of Daniel that made Luce hold her tongue. The thrilling touch of his skin on hers when she’d pushed him down at the lake

And this is pretty much the reason why teenagers aren’t allowed to make life-altering decisions. 

Then the Parent’s Day is over and Luce’s parents leave WITHOUT ONE SINGLE FUCKING THING HAPPENING.  What a fucking waste of space.  Several thousand words of absolute, pure fucking nonsense.  There was no reason for any of that to exist.

And then Luce gets all sad because Penn goes to see her father’s grave, which is actually a pretty touching scene.  It gets ruined by the image of Daniel…sitting on top of a giant statue doing his whole tragic-tortured-lone-wolf bit, apparently all so Luce can just cry over how tragic-tortured-alone he is.

Yeah, because that was worth a whole chapter’s worth of NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENING.  Good to know that Luce is still obsessed with Daniel and his lack of a family, not like that’s come up before or anything.