a friend asked me what the genre of this book is a few days ago so i replied 'literature' & then she said 'is it romance or horror or fantasy or adventure or' & i was thinking: mint leaves, kites, balloons, owls, flight, wintry sadness, February, holes in the sky, the girl who smells of honey & smoke, children, ghosts, devastation, holiday lights, tunnels, parchment papers, being troubled to be untroubled, 'bad' people don't actually seem that 'bad' after all—oh my gosh i don't know really so i just said 'i think it's somewhere in between what's real & what's fictional & you're not going to understand what beautiful surrealism is until you read this'
synopsis by the author: February is persecuting the townspeople. It has been winter for more than three hundred days. All forms of flight are banned and children have started to disappear, taken from their beds in the middle of the night. The town's priests hang ominous sheets of parchment on the trees, signed 'February'. And somewhere on the outskirts of the town lives February himself, with the girl who smells of honey and smoke.honestly felt uncertain about this book after reading only the first few pages after picking it up for the first time a few weeks back, so i put it back down & left the bookstore. was thoroughly regretting my decision by the time i got home & prayed that no one else had bought it (it was the last copy on the shelf) then made a trip down to the same bookstore the next day to purchase it (with other books)
i was actually first drawn to this book, because of, more than its content, its unique style of text & printed dialogues without the inverted commas which looks something like: Nights like this will soon die, Selah whispered in my ear. / Bianca whispers into the bath water. Maybe the priests aren't really priests. Look at the way their silly robes move.
found shane jone's way of structuring his writing incredibly intriguing & encouraging at the same time. thought, is this a sign that alt lit/writing styles once termed as 'obscured' are gradually being well-loved widely
light boxes is mostly narrated in the perspective of thaddeus, father to bianca and husband of selah. the 'protagonists' did change along the novel but i thought the novel primarily involved thaddeus' thoughts. what i found vaguely confusing was February. February in this book was a month before it was a season or a weather. then it was an antagonist & a mistaken man & then a godlike figure (still an antagonist) but with haunting hopelessness living in his bones. & of course February was also, i think, a symbol of sadness/coldness/devastation/loss/loss of Flight & Flight was a symbol of freedom, happiness, hope, probably (my lit national exam is coming up hence the efforts of analytical thinking using literary devices). some things i found interesting were how shane jones quite deliberately showed the 'flip-side' of the antagonist for example
He looks scared, thought Thaddeus.&
I thought you were dead, said Thaddeus looking at February.
February shook his head no.
I'm not dead, he said. As a matter of fact, I don't know who or what I am anymore. Everyone in town is terrified of me. They blame me for an endless season where all it does is snow and the skies are gray and everyone is filled with endless sadness.
The girl who smelled of honey and smoke led Thaddeus into a cold bedroom. A man was sleeping under the sheets. His hair was brown and curly. He looked sad.& then
That's him. That's February.
List Written by February and Carried in February's Corduroy Coat Pocketthought first point vividly shows how the world defines 'good' and 'bad' by 'what everyone does' and 'what nobody does' respectively / shane jones must really love dandelions, how precious a male creature he is / 'but i'm not a good person', you are the most honest human to have ever walked this earth
1. I am not a bad person. I have enjoyed June, July, August like everyone else.
2. I fed you dandelions and picked the stems from your teeth with my tongue.
3. You smell of honey and smoke. That's what I call you. Girl who smells of honey and smoke. But you're more than that. You're a field of dandelions.
4. I have this nightmare where I'm standing in the field of dandelions holding a scythe. The horizon is children marching. Each child holds one of your teeth.
5. I'm so confused it almost feels calm.
6. I am guilty of kidnapping children. I am guilty of Bianca and causing great pain to Thaddeus and Selah and the town.
7. I want to be a good person but I'm not.
& my favourite of them all
Short List Found in February's Back Pocketfeel like we're all antagonists after all & maybe that's what makes us human. do we not always feel like we've 'done everything we can' & are needy of knowing that people 'won't leave', only to see how the stories we wrote 'to show love' 'turned to war'. 'how awful' indeed. & mostly, we kidnap ourselves from being limitless, we take our own 'flight away'
1. I've done everything I can.
2. I need to know you won't leave.
3. I wrote a story to show love and it turned to war. How awful.
4. I twisted myself around stars and poked the moon where the moon couldn't reach.
5. I'm the kind of person who kidnaps children and takes flight away.
on a different note here are some parts which i really like
Note Found in February's Pocket by The Girl Who Smells of Honey and Smoke
I wanted to write you a story about magic. I wanted rabbits appearing from hats. I wanted balloons lifting you into the sky. It turned out to be nothing but sadness, war, heartbreak. You never saw it, but there's a garden inside me.
They held me and told me everything will be fine, that sadness will rise from our bones and evaporate in the sunlight the way morning fog burned off the river in summer. My mother rubbed the kites on my hands and arms and told me to think of my lungs as balloons.
I just want to feel safe, I said.
I vomit ice cubes. / There's a ghost next to me. / i loved this quite so very much although it took me a few pages before i could find myself entering into the book–perhaps because this work of art is a kind of beauty i have never experienced before, or that it's so perfectly abstract that it wasn't all that easy for a soul living in a realm of reality to fathom right away
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