What were your favorite scenes or sections of the book? I had SO many favorites, but for starters, I thought Milton's death scene was brilliant. It was so touching and beautiful. And it really made me feel for this character, maybe for the first time in the book.
He was crying not because he was about to die but because I, Calliope, was still gone, because he had failed to save me, because he had done everything he could to get me back and still I was missing.
As the car tipped its nose down, the river appeared again. Milton Stephanides, an old navy man, prepared to meet it. Right at the end he was no longer thinking about me. I have to be honest and record Milton's thoughts as they occurred to him. At the very end he wasn't thinking about me or Tessie or any of us. There was no time. As the car plunged, Milton only had time to be astonished by the way things had turned out. All his life he had lectured everybody about the right way to do things and now he had done this, the stupidest thing ever. He could hardly believe he had loused things up quite so badly. His last word, therefore, was spoken softly, without anger or fear, only with bewilderment and a measure of bravery. "Birdbrain," Milton said, to himself, in his last Cadillac. And then the water claimed him.
2 comments:
That was a good scene with Milton, the bizarre serious and silliness summing up his life.
The scenes with the Object were probably the most memorable for me. Painfully poignant and bittersweet.
However, I also really enjoyed the early chapters when Lefty and Desdemona are starting out in Detroit.
Oh, and I also really liked the riot scene, where Milton is holed up in the Zebra Room and little Callie rides her bike through the carnage to see him.
And the scenes with Clementine Stark were brilliant. Callie's first kiss: ... her medicine-sweet lips puckering up and all the other sounds of the world going silent ... all silent, as Clementine's highly educated, eight-year-old lips met mine.
And then, somewhere below this, my heart reacting.
Not a thump exactly. Not even a leap. But a kind of swish, like a frog kicking off from a muddy bank.
Isn't that fantastic?
And then the lovely amphibian imagery continues (don't you always think of kids this age as amphibious somehow? slippery, pliable, adaptable) as, later, they are rolling around in the bathhouse like tadpoles, only to look up through the steam and see a stroke-paralyzed Lefty. Great scene.
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