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peytonaaa 's review for:

4.0
emotional reflective

This is one of those books that's really hard to reduce to a coherent numerical rating. Its flaws are obvious and significant and yet sometimes it seems like Anne Rice understands concepts like the patriarchal family or communion with the other like virtually no one else. I'm reminded of something V.C. Andrews' editor, Ann Patty, said about Andrews, which is also applicable here: "I'm not pretending this woman is Tolstoy. But she's a fantastic storyteller with a world view. What separates the writers who really hit is a world view." Also the anticlimax of the ending feels ahead of its time, like something you'd see in a prestige TV show now. 

"... I thought that when the pain was gone you would forgive me for what part I played in her death. She never loved you, you know. Not in the way that I loved you, and the way that you loved us both. I knew this! I understood it! And I believed I would gather you to me and hold you. And time would open to us, and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. But you’re dead inside to me, you’re cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I’m not here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don’t exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. I shudder when I’m near you. I look into your eyes and my reflection isn’t there..."