The Tenth Circle

Artificially constructed, a riddle that is only a riddle because the writer witholds crucial facts of what's going on in the first place. Not my cup of tea.

I have been reading books that have been on my reading list the longest and finally got to this one. I don't know why I never felt inclined to read this one. I think I picked it up because of the mention of Alaska and that's where I live. I normally read mysteries though so I kept going for those and not this. It did start to drag for me - since it just isn't my usual genre - but I finally got into it. I ended up really enjoying the story. I was surprised to see the comic art inside and that helped a lot. The artwork was great and I loved how it went with the story and connected with all of family involved.

Dreams, Trixie thought, were like soap bubbles. You could look at them from a distance, and they were lovely. It's when you stuck your face too close that your eyes wound up stinging.


When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything ... but then again, neither did you.


And like any accelerant, that would change the equation. Add love, and a person might do something crazy. Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.


Normal's relative.


Even though parents don't want to admit it, school isn't about what a kid absorbs while she's sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that.


What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?


As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.


She was still afraid, years later - not of the dark but of the days. One after another, and no end in sight.


How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I don't look like me?


All he'd ever been able to do was repaint the world for her, until it became a place she wanted to be.


Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can't become.


Had he forgotten, or had he intended to forget all along?


Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?


I did not die, and yet I lost life's breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.


“Why did you want to leave so badly?”
Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”
“Then you weren't really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”


... she inched up the wrist of her coat and looked at the loose net of scars. It was her hairline crack, she supposed, and it was only a matter of time before she completely went to pieces.


Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky it bled color?


Maybe it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.


Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.”


It was easier than you'd think to grow accustomed to silence.


. . . and as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head ... or maybe just your old ones, minus the hope.


She could remember who she used to be - that picture was like an image sealed into a snow globe, one that went fuzzy when she shook it too hard but then, if she held her breath, might see clearly.


Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.


Fastening and tucking seemed so much more intimate than unbuttoning and unzipping, as if you were privy to putting the person back together whole, instead of unraveling him.


A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed


What made a hero a hero? Was it winning all the time, like Superman? Or was it taking on the task reluctantly, like Spider-Man? Was it learning, like the X-Men had, that at any moment you might fall from grace to become a villain? Or, like Alan Moore's Rorschach, was it being human enough to enjoy watching people die, if they deserved it?


“Being a cop isn't all that different from being a father, you know. You do your damnedest, and it's still not good enough to keep the people you care about from hurting themselves.”


Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

It was an ok book. The story was good some parts where too long and not necessary for the story. I didn't feel any sympathy for any character.

An interesting but sad story.