[Catlady]

Originally Posted by gmw

The secrecy thing is only illogical if you decide to make it so; one sentence from the author could have made up an explicit reason - but why bother? It simply is. And it's one of the least interesting unexplained items in the story.

Why bother? Well, why bother with any pesky little details, why bother with internal consistency and continuity?

Just tell me WHY the author went out of his way to make the murders and the missing child a secret, why he made this event something relegated to the middle of the newspaper as if it were a garden club meeting of no importance. Yes, I want an explicit reason to explain something that should not have happened except for ... whatever the author wants to invent. I don't forgive this kind of sloppiness/unconcern/disdain for the reader--whatever you want to call it. It's shoddy, lazy writing, and it amazes me that anyone condones it and excuses it.

The self-fulfilling prophesy aspect is - for me - one of those more disappointing aspects of story: it's so much standard fare for prophesies as to be trite or cliche. Like time-travel stories that wrap themselves in a loop where everything happened as it did because of time travel is both cause an effect.

There's also the unexplained involvement of Silas--how'd he know about the Jacks, did he know they were responsible for the murders right away? Why didn't he destroy Jack Frost the first night at the graveyard? This is all stuff that's unanswered--I'm mostly willing to let it slide, but it's more of what made this book unsatisfying; it's a bunch of episodes that don't add up to a novel.

-Hmm... I never saw Bod - the boy who had been talking of revenge - as likely to cry over the loss of the men that killed his family. And you're right, death doesn't mean quite the same to Bod as it does to Scarlett. To quote Silas: ‘I am afraid you do Bod an injustice. But you will undoubtedly be happier if you remember none of this. [...]’

No, you misunderstand me--I didn't expect Bod to be weeping and wailing, but he doesn't react at all. He's cold--he's like a hit man or an executioner who has no personal involvement; he's like Jack. He doesn't seem to understand why Scarlett is even upset. That's why he seems to have become a monster.

This is a story intended to be suitable for younger readers. It is also a story that feels very much like a fairytale. It certainly doesn't feel like "high fantasy" where we might expect The Honour Guard and The Hounds of God to have come with full pedigree as part of a thousand page epic. It's a short relatively sweet fable and I see your expectation for extraneous details as unreasonable in this context.

No, I don't need a thousand-page epic, I need for the author to add a few sentences of explanation for things he's inserted into the narrative that make no sense.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I think it is natural to want revenge and feel angry towards the Jacks. The opening story is very grim and dark. Jack's evil nature is dripping from the page. He took away Bod's whole family and a normal childhood of the living. Bod doesn't even know his name given by his parents. Bod knows that he is protected in the graveyard and that outside are bad people that want to do bad things to him. Jack Frost tricks him into the attic and makes it clear he intends to kill him. Why should Bod not want to escape? They chase him into the graveyard. Bod has to fight back if he wants to live because after all he still has a life to live in the outside world and he's not ready to join the graveyard people. He doesn't rejoice in fighting the Jacks (no wicked cackles here). It's more something he has to do to live.

Does not his experience with dead people teach him that his parents and sister are still probably hanging around in a comfy graveyard of their own, part of an equally interesting community? It's odd that he never thinks of them in that context--they're apart from him, yes, but they're not completely gone.

For that matter, I wonder why Bod never considers looking for them wherever they were buried. That would be an interesting quest.

Originally Posted by CRussel

No, I didn't attribute any sense of inverse progression, but the simple fact that Bod was on the third floor. He killed them as he got to them, and Bod was on the top floor.

Which, as I pointed out earlier, is pretty crazy--the baby is farther away from the parents than the older daughter is.

Originally Posted by gmw

By the time we get an explanation for killing the entire family the story is almost done and a reader involved in the story no longer cares much why it came out this way. That the explanation is left quite vague ("nativities") lets the involved reader continue without unnecessarily complicated elaborations. If a reader is not involved in the story by this time it's too late to satisfy them anyway.

This reader cares about why. This reader read through the whole book wanting to know the reason for the murders. This reader wants a payoff that's not vague and questionable. This reader feels that the ending soured the whole book.