Little Eve (Ward)
Jan. 18th, 2023 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn4/5 - 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 betweenrachelmanija 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.
I felt like this book was extremely, staggeringly well structured. Days after finishing it I was all "wait a second, she totally set up Thing X!"
rachelmanija and I were wildly speculating about 75% in, and one of my random speculations (probably I came up with it as a result of my just having read an Agatha Christie where this was a similar plotline) actually WAS that Dinah was Eve -- but then both rachel and I were all "...oh, but that wouldn't work at all because Jamie would have recognized her and so would Christopher Black! Ok, on to Next Wild Speculation!" THEN it turned out that those two things were actually not relevant because of the WILD UNRELIABLE NARRATOR THING, but at that point we were all "OMG WILD UNRELIABLE NARRATOR" and that sleight of hand successfully turned both of our thoughts away from the fact that Jamie's and Christopher Black's evidence were no longer in play. JUST SO WELL DONE.
Also, speaking of UNRELIABLE NARRATOR THING, I am still totally wild about the namedropping of Agatha Christie and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the first chapter becauserachelmanija SPECIFICALLY called it out as a namecheck when we read that bit. I'm also in awe of how it was also handily disguised by a Bill the Pony reference which I think is intentionally put in there to mislead the reader -- that reference is an external one, of course, and not one that anyone in the novel would have known, so any reader is going to say wisely, "ah, Ward is Putting in References," and leave it at that. SHE KNOWS ALL THE TRICKS.
I also loved that Little Eve was diametrically opposite Rawblood in that the red herring in Rawblood is that all the ambiguous elements have a realistic explanation -- but no, it's really supernatural! In this book, the red herring is the supernatural explanation -- but no, it's really explainable with mundane explanations! (Because Ward cannot resist her little callouts to ambiguity, though, there's one element that passes by without comment -- and Eve never knows it -- but where it seems that there might actually have been a supernatural element; I refer here to Eve seeing Hector's death, which is taken as proof that she doesn't have second sight, because she gets one key element (we think) wrong, but we later learn she was correct.)
It's SO beautifully constructed, everything is explained (except for that one ambiguous piece above which I am sure was intentional), everything fits together like a well-designed puzzle. The only niggle I had was Sarah's death, which I wish had meant something -- as it was, it was just completely random. Like, I see Doylistically why it had to occur (to set up Jamie's bargain) but Watsonially I would have liked it to have some sort of effect that Sarah did try to do something to save them even though she had every reason not to -- even if it was just motivating Eve just a little more, or something.
Also every time Christopher Black and Eve had a scene together it was just excruciatingly heartbreaking <333333 I loved them both so much. I can't really get over how hard he tried to save her, how hard she fought against it (because abuse does such a number on her brain), how hard it was for her to figure out that he was only trying to save her, how damaged they both are, how they both got a measure of peace at the end. Also Alice and Eve, and how much Alice did to save her as well. <333333 (I also SO want fix-its where Christopher and Alice and Eve all run away together before anything bad happens, omg!! Dinah and Mary can come too!!)
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 bothrachelmanija 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
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.I felt like this book was extremely, staggeringly well structured. Days after finishing it I was all "wait a second, she totally set up Thing X!"
rachelmanija and I were wildly speculating about 75% in, and one of my random speculations (probably I came up with it as a result of my just having read an Agatha Christie where this was a similar plotline) actually WAS that Dinah was Eve -- but then both rachel and I were all "...oh, but that wouldn't work at all because Jamie would have recognized her and so would Christopher Black! Ok, on to Next Wild Speculation!" THEN it turned out that those two things were actually not relevant because of the WILD UNRELIABLE NARRATOR THING, but at that point we were all "OMG WILD UNRELIABLE NARRATOR" and that sleight of hand successfully turned both of our thoughts away from the fact that Jamie's and Christopher Black's evidence were no longer in play. JUST SO WELL DONE.Also, speaking of UNRELIABLE NARRATOR THING, I am still totally wild about the namedropping of Agatha Christie and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the first chapter because
rachelmanija SPECIFICALLY called it out as a namecheck when we read that bit. I'm also in awe of how it was also handily disguised by a Bill the Pony reference which I think is intentionally put in there to mislead the reader -- that reference is an external one, of course, and not one that anyone in the novel would have known, so any reader is going to say wisely, "ah, Ward is Putting in References," and leave it at that. SHE KNOWS ALL THE TRICKS.I also loved that Little Eve was diametrically opposite Rawblood in that the red herring in Rawblood is that all the ambiguous elements have a realistic explanation -- but no, it's really supernatural! In this book, the red herring is the supernatural explanation -- but no, it's really explainable with mundane explanations! (Because Ward cannot resist her little callouts to ambiguity, though, there's one element that passes by without comment -- and Eve never knows it -- but where it seems that there might actually have been a supernatural element; I refer here to Eve seeing Hector's death, which is taken as proof that she doesn't have second sight, because she gets one key element (we think) wrong, but we later learn she was correct.)
It's SO beautifully constructed, everything is explained (except for that one ambiguous piece above which I am sure was intentional), everything fits together like a well-designed puzzle. The only niggle I had was Sarah's death, which I wish had meant something -- as it was, it was just completely random. Like, I see Doylistically why it had to occur (to set up Jamie's bargain) but Watsonially I would have liked it to have some sort of effect that Sarah did try to do something to save them even though she had every reason not to -- even if it was just motivating Eve just a little more, or something.
Also every time Christopher Black and Eve had a scene together it was just excruciatingly heartbreaking <333333 I loved them both so much. I can't really get over how hard he tried to save her, how hard she fought against it (because abuse does such a number on her brain), how hard it was for her to figure out that he was only trying to save her, how damaged they both are, how they both got a measure of peace at the end. Also Alice and Eve, and how much Alice did to save her as well. <333333 (I also SO want fix-its where Christopher and Alice and Eve all run away together before anything bad happens, omg!! Dinah and Mary can come too!!)
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
