It happened again. I was at the airport waiting for my plane to arrive and noticed that my Kindle was about to die because my boyfriend had been playing games on it the previous night and never plugged it in. Crap! What was I going to do?
Then I remembered that a fellow Twitterer recommended a book to not long ago and I had it downloaded to the cloud so I could access it via my phone. The book was Castles by Benjamin X. Wretlind, an author I had not experience with. I took the dive anyway and it was so good I almost couldn’t put it down when the captain announced that electronic devices needed to be turned off.
The story is a sad one – one of a woman who struggles to find her way out of a life that has been filled with abuse and alcoholism since she was a child. Throughout her life she clings to the idea that Heaven is full of castles “built for little girls by little girls” and that the men in her life will be forced into an eternity of labor to care for the women in the castles when all is said and done.
In the very end, the woman becomes the monster she so feared herself – someone who is abusive and unforgiving and longs for the moment when another opportunity comes along for her to take her vengeance on another.
This book raises an excellent question about what long-term abuse can produce over time. The main character often reflects on the time of innocents when her grandmother was still alive and she needed her Barbie night light. Just at the time she was becoming a woman, her grandmother passed away and the love and patience she would need over the next few years went with it. When the book ends, she has been turned into a manipulative, violent monster who longs to take her vengeance on new prey.
There are a lot of symbols in this book as well. Desert eels devour the boys and men that harm her and her mother over the years. The bus in the desert acts as an alter of sacrifice to take the carcasses of abusive boyfriends to so the eels can “clean them up.” And even the castles themselves are sanctuaries to look forward to in the afterlife since life on earth is so oppressive.
Overall, this is a very good read. You’ll need to realize that domestic abuse is described within the story, though not grotesquely or in ill taste. I recommend this to anyone who likes a book that makes you think.
And don’t worry about my Kindle. I’m sure it’s not the last time it will die. I’ll just have to keep remembering to download my purchases to the cloud so I can access them anytime I want.
What is your favorite psychological thriller?
