Something on Sunday, 10/15

Sunday again, huh?  Well, it's been a surprisingly good reading week, given that I worked two jobs, attended a committee meeting, a kid's birthday party, and a small, casual get together.  I took the weekend to just sit and read, and now I'm going to dig into another week with a HUGE to-do list in front of me.

Quick review of one awful book I read this week will be my Something on Sunday: The Cresswell Plot, by Eliza Wass. I picked it up because it's about a reclusive family that functions like a cult and the main character is a girl who doubts they are the Chosen Ones.  Castella Cresswell wears homemade clothes and has been promised in marriage to her brother (as  all her brothers and sisters have been paired up).  Everyone in town knows they're weird.  But maybe she wants things to be different.

I love a good wacky cult.  I love an escape from the cult story, and I love a good not-sure-I-want-to-escape-from-the-cult story.  This was neither, and both.  Every single character changed everything they thought and felt from scene to scene.  You can't grow as a character if you don't have a character to begin with. 

And it wasn't just that they were full of contradictions.  Like "I want to escape, but what if Father is right and the rest of the world is going to hell, and also I love my family and don't want to leave, but god the abuse sucks."  Yeah, that's all okay.  But she will literally run away one minute and then start screaming in the woods, and then tremble with fear, and then wish she had blue jeans to wear and a boy to kiss her, and then threaten to hit her sibling with a club, and then, I don't know, join drama club? 

It made no sense, is what I'm saying.  Hard pass.