This chapter is another flashback. This time, it’s Mara waking up in a patient room at the old abandoned asylum where her group of friends decided to spend the night. (You’re in a haunted asylum on a lark and you decide to…nap?)

Surprise!sexual assault as Jude wants to make out, Mara doesn’t, and Jude decides to press the matter anyway. I won’t go into details because it’s actually pretty horrifying and I don’t want to.

I don’t really object to the scene in and of itself. It’s well done, it serves a purpose, Jude’s character is set up to be the kind of jerk to do this. It’s not cartoonishly cruel, but the act is treated with the due amount of horror it deserves anyway. Other than the general problem of books not having warnings for anything, I don’t see a problem. In fact, all I really object to is the fact that it’s in the same book with that fucking asshole Noah. I’m pissed off that the book can do such a stellar job at “what it’s like to date an asshole” but then goes ahead and tries to sell Noah to us as a romantic lead anyway.

Mara gets her “I started to imagine him dead” routine going, and we all know what happens when she imagines someone dead. Except instead of it happening out of sight, this time the building falls down.

Mara wakes up in present time to her whole family bouncing into her room and singing happy birthday. Mara is a little disoriented still from the dream and the wild night, and she notices that Joseph looks fine and her shoulder doesn’t hurt. She wonders if the whole incident even really happened.

And if it hadn’t happened, I couldn’t let my mother know. Because she would have me committed for sure.

Have you committed for what? If it didn’t happen, then wasn’t it basically just a dream? Do you think people go to full-time mental care facilities for dreaming? I mean, yeah, you hallucinate, but unless you also think you were wandering around outside in your hallucination, then “hallucinating while lying in bed and sleeping” isn’t really something to go to a hospital for. Kind of everyone does it.

Noah comes to pick her up, and Mara is still in a funk and scared from all the vivid dreaming she’s been doing and wondering if the swamp part of it was real or not. Since Noah is also acting totally normal, she figures it wasn’t real. They sit in his car and talk in vague terms about bad dreams and if she even wants to remember her bad dreams or not.

Mara suddenly decides that, no, really does want to remember what happened that night, and she knows she can’t force herself to remember but thinks maybe she’s been forcing herself not to remember and she has to choose to want it. So she asks Noah to help her.

Now that I knew what was wrong, I knew how to fix it. “A hypnotist.”

Excuse me, I’ll just be over here in a corner, banging my head against the wall forever.

Look, I get that there is some evidence that hypnosis, in conjunction with other forms of therapy, can be some amount of helpful to some people. But Mara gets all excited here like it’s going to be the Holy Grail of brain fixes. And I have no idea where she got this idea, since she goes on to explain that her mother (the psychiatrist) thinks the whole thing is a bunch of hoey. So, literally, where does she get this idea from? Most of popular culture treats hypnosis like a stage trick at best, and with her mother’s rhetoric in her ear she should be even more skeptical than others. I don’t get it?

So Noah asks his butler to make an appointment with a “hypnotist” ASAP, and doesn’t offer any context, so if there’s any justice in the world the butler would set them up with a stage magician thinking he’s about to do a birthday party.

But I’m not holding out any hope for justice in this book.

They go to lunch while waiting to hear back from the butler, and while at the restaurant waiting to be seated Mara spots a flyer for a hypnotist that does walk-in appointments.

Are you fucking kidding me?

How fucking contrived can you get? And how many times can you pull this trick within the same book?

And it’s not like this would even be a hard fix? Just have her not even think about going to a hypnotist until she sees the flier. Literally all you would have to do is take out two pages, no further editing needed. It would still be a little convenient, but not nearly as much as “I’ve suddenly decided I need a hypnotist, oh look, there’s one.” This…this is just sad.

Two really short chapters today, and frankly, the thing I’m most annoyed at is the utter lack of narrative progress we got from the whole kidnapping incident. I’m not sure if that really was supposed to be all in her mind or not, but either way. If it was fake, then it was a really clumsy escalation of her hallucinations which didn’t even have any fallout, and she could have been pushed into her current “no I wanna fix stuff” but something that was either creepier/had more fallout. If it wasn’t fake, then someone got fucking kidnapped and just hopped out of bed the next morning to sing Happy Birthday. Fail on both fronts.