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Aug. 25th, 2024 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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This is a book with a very distinctive voice that immediately sets up Questions and Mysteries. The nameless ten-year-old Robber Girl accompanies Gentleman Jack and his gang of bandits haunting the plains of what seems to be the American West; she has a mysterious and mostly-forgotten past, a judgmental dagger that speaks to her in her head, an Affliction that prevents her from speaking except when spoken to first, and a promise that once she's helped Gentleman Jack achieve his goals she will gain a Grandmother and a home and an opportunity to be loved.
When an attempted act of banditry goes wrong, Gentleman Jack ends up in jail, and the Robber Girl ends up at the house of the town judge and his depressed and grieving wife. She wants to help Gentleman Jack escape from jail. The Judge wants her to testify at his trial and also for her to eat some square meals. We, the readers -- at least if our small group is any judge -- want to know who the Robber Girl is, and how she came to be with Gentleman Jack, and who Grandmother is, and what the Judge's motivations are for his kindness, and whether the talking dagger is real and can in fact talk, and how Afflictions work, and whether we are currently in an alternate American West or not, and whether the town is in fact part of the broader civilization implied by the fact that Jack is accused of murdering a Federal Marshall, and and and ....
.... and some of these questions will be answered! But not all of them, and many of them sort of hastily at the end in a way that I'm not sure actually makes a ton of sense when you spend several weeks interestedly batting about possible answers, which, unfortunately, we were. Honestlhy I think the book is really much less interested in its mysteries and much more in ( general spoilers for the high-level thematic stuff I think the book is doing very well and the stuff that it does less well )
I had a fantastic time and I have no regrets about the way we did it, but I do think I'd be a higher on the book if I'd just raced through it and let the Robber Girl's voice carry me along.
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