Little Eve (Ward)

4/5 - rachelmanija and I had been planning for months to read the last of the Catriona Ward horror books we hadn't yet read, Little Eve. Finally we both had schedules free and we read it over the course of a week over chat, making sure we synced every chapter (although we were mostly in sync reading within chapters as well).

Each chapter of Little Eve is set in a particular year in the first half of the 20th century (some chapters are in the same year, some are different). The first chapter starts in a rather macabre way, as you might expect from a Catriona Ward book. It starts with the young man Jamie making a delivery at a castle on an island that is known to have strange denizens who keep to themselves. But when he gets there, he finds five bodies, gruesomely mutilated and laid out in a way that suggests a kind of ritual sacrifice. (Jamie also finds the severed thumb of one of them, thus leading to a lot of hilarious exchanges between rachelmanija and me -- including rachel's immediate response to Jamie's find, "When I found part of a human thumb I buried it." (It could only happen to Rachel!) -- and also many subsequent uses of the thumbs-up emoticon 👍, which as a result I shall never be able to think of again without thinking of severed thumbs, omg.)

(Note that this chapter is the worst it gets in terms of gruesome detail. This book definitely ratchets up the death count and the WTF, but there weren't any other parts I found hard to read because of over-the-top gore, like there were in Rawblood.)

I absolutely loved this book. I think it's my favorite of her books. (I'm so glad that Sundial was the first Ward book we read and Little Eve was the last, because I think our reading went in order of how much I liked them.) I hardly dare say any more about it, because it's fun to go in without knowing anything. (I would even say not to read the chapter headers ahead of time.) I will say that there is at least one relationship that rachel and I found extremely extremely compelling. And also that there is a LOT of depiction of abuse and the kind of damage that abuse does in multiple modalities (mildred_of_midgard, I did think of your discussions of primates a lot while reading it). And as usual there are a lot of warnings (see end of post). I will also say that it does not do the Sundial thing of making the ending Annoyingly Terrible at the Last Minute, for which we were both very thankful. (And there was a part where you could see that she could have made the ending Annoyingly Terrible at the Last Minute, and maybe thought about it, but didn't, thank you Ward! If she had done that I think I would have thrown my kindle across the room.) I found the ending satisfying and earned, if bittersweet.

( Spoilers, PLEASE do not read if you are planning to read this book! Also implicit spoilers for Rawblood )

Little Eve, as usual for a Ward book, comes with all the warnings. I was telling D about Catriona Ward and he suggested it needed a bingo card, which both rachelmanija and I thought was brilliant. We came up with the following potential list for bingo, which also serves as incomplete content notes:
-child abuse
-mysterious death
-mutilation
-second sight
-ghosts (either literal or figurative)
-ambiguity
-shocking twist
-female character it's very easy to empathize with
-male character who ought to come to a Bad End
-shocking time skip
-animal harm (here, bees and at least one dead dog, though only mentioned, not shown on screen)
-on that note, dead dog
-animal blamed for something which is really a human's fault
-ghost animal
-ambiguously real animal
-person being talked about as an animal
-only companions are animals
-free space: WTF
(Ward fans, any others? I suppose we should have seven more for a card... Identity shenanigans and parental bonds also come to mind! Also: miscarriage.)
Can't wait for her next book to come out to make bingo cards :PP