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🦋 Main Character

I am finding In Hovering Flight to be very strongly a book about one single character, Scarlet; all the other figures seem to be present in service of her story. This is a pretty common state of affairs with novels, and not something I hold against the book; but it's striking me as odd that so much of the book is devoted to people who are not the primary character -- when I started Chapter Nine this evening I had an immediate reaction of "Oh yeah, now this feels like a novel again!" as Scarlet re-entered the picture, after a long expository section about Tom and Addie's history.

Also in Chapter Nine, beautiful timing:

The oriole's nest, that delicate, swinging pendulum woven from plant fiber and hair, made Scarlet cry every time she saw it. She could still see Richard's face as he held it up for everyone to view one evening at dinner, swinging it slowly back and forth and following it with his eyes, a look of rapture on his face.

"They must build it this way so the wind can rock it back and forth like this, to soothe the babies," he said as he watched the nest. "Like the cradle in the treetop."

Everyone smiled, enjoying the thought, and also Richard's obvious pleasure. No one said anything about how "Rock-a-Bye Baby" ends.

posted evening of Saturday, October 25th, 2008
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