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Kaethe

Kaethe

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Tower of Silence - Sarah Rayne Rayne takes an incident in the past, something really, really, nasty, that not surprisingly, traumatizes the hell out of everyone involved. And then she sees what happens to those people as time passes: how do they cope, or fail to? She's pure genius at imagining horrible things that can happen to people, and horrible things that people can do. But she doesn't operate on just the one level, even as some people bear these dreadful scars, other people bear other scars, all kinds of different people show up, so there's a very old-fashioned spinster, and a very modern young woman with strangely colored hair, and they get along quite well. There is a bit of instalove, but in a delightful change from the YA world, these characters reason against it. I know, right? Just because they feel that connection they don't suddenly cast aside their whole lives and give in to it.I like an author who is sympathetic to her characters, and in this story, partially set in a high-security institution for the criminally insane, there is both great compassion for, and mistrust of the inmates. The ambivalence of wanting to help, and knowing that these people can never be cured; of understanding the traumas that wrecked them, as well as fearing the damage they could still do: this is some finely nuanced stuff.Despite the really, really, nasty bits, the book is fun. Rayne isn't afraid to get meta, to create a gothic scene, to give it lightening, and to have characters think how very gothic it all is. Jane Austen observed that characters in books seem never to read books. Rayne is having none of that. Story is vitally important to everyone as a way to make sense of their world, and so we are let into the minds of people as they try out different versions of the story they are in: fairy tales, religious teachings, newspaper headlines, dinner table anecdotes. That dense layering of story is a delight to readers.Lida's copy.