The Alchemy of Stone Book

Do kids stare at you? Not like they look at other adults (just more adults in a taller treetop world). Unknown quantities. Not them. Not the other thems (meaning adults). Deciding to be afraid or not, or where to place you in budding perspectives. (Could be looks of judgement. My little niece stares only to proclaim that my hair looks bad. After loooong periods. THAT'S what you wanted to say? I'm sure she gets it from her mother. She always hated my hair.) Still deciding who everyone else is. Staring. What do those looks mean? Do you ever exchange looks with children right back? (Are they just a mini adult who will proclaim that your hair looks bad?) I always had a staring problem. My ex once told me that kids stared at me because they sensed that I was one of them. It depressed me very much, back then, because he really didn't get it. The look is because the inbetween space is undecided. The other is boring. I do know how Mattie feels. Looked on to complement, not as your own whole self. Pulled along in case you get in someone else's way. Expected to make social mistakes. It's an awful feeling. It's the new people she meets that interested me. Potential.

The whispered thread going through all the voices I try to listen that speaks to me was ALMOST there. Over what makes a person a person, what is a soul, men versus women, control. Society blah blah. I know the expected mistake feeling. Is it wrong that I wanted the other voice to be louder? I feel it was more important. I've been looking for stories that have that thread for as long as I can remember. I hold them inside when I find them hoping they'll be around at a time when another peice will fall into place. Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (Portia is the apart kind of eyes and staring). Gary Oldman dancing with the kids in Sid & Nancy (he's one of them). Yukio Mishima's moments of all the same bodies in tangled limbs and laughing arms for a kid again festivities. No eyes, no thinking. One of them. (I have more. I don't have enough. I want to figure this out.) The decision limbo... To be afraid? To be? A part... Whatever it is, you can't see what it is they see from those tall tree tops.

Mattie is an automaton. A machine. A clunker. Her heart is wound up and her creator, Loharri, has the key. She's programmed to not be her own. There are other threads, too. It is hard to put all this together at once, free will and genetic make up. How much is variables? I inherited social anxiety from my mama (it was bred further by being beaten into me that no one would ever like me). If I have caffeine and forget to take my vitamins my depression is exponentially worse, and unmanageable before my period. I am not myself. How much is ME and how much is just diet? Am I trudging through my mama's footsteps? You are what you eat and mostly water. It can make all the difference, those variables, in overcoming circumstances and how I was made. Mattie was made to be a slave. She was given enough of a mind of her own to not be boring. She was made to look how someone else wanted her to look (I fought bitterly to escape that, growing up. Matching outfits, twins, that whole cliche was my life).

Not everyone she meets is like Loharri (and he wants more from her than most). But the staring. The looks of difference and not knowing if you're going to learn to be afraid or not... What do people want from others, anyway? Girlfriends, sisters, brothers, boyfriends, fathers, children...

That's it. Making children and then they are forever your appendage, delighting in reflecting back of one's own ego, kids say the darndest things, cute little dress up outfits. But what about the rest of the kids? Mattie meets the soul smoker. The soul smoker took the job of hosting the souls of the dead until he dies and can lead them to wherever the dead goes because he had no other life. Her foriegner friend, mistrusted because she is different. Her not really a friend client, Ilonda. The feminism thread was beside the point really, I felt. It's like picking one oppressed group from history and saying that no one else had it bad. They COULD have all been in it together, if they didn't decide to mistrust after the staring moments. (I wasn't too interested in Ilonda the courtier who would only hire other women. Too fun loving girl and, like Mattie, I don't easily connect to that type because I don't know how to behave the same way.) Peasants had no jobs and were replaced with machines. The childhood objectification thing was over all. The gargoyles (holy shades of Meredith Anne Peirce's The Darkangel Trilogy here) who made the city but have been forgotten in the greed of the mechanics (like Loharri) seek out other lost souls like themselves. Kids staring to other kids staring. Almost. Mattie falls in love with their feeder, Sebastian (another persecuted foriegner) who doesn't see her past his own mechanics desire to take apart someone and see how they might work for them. "I made that. They are in my image." Child of god, machine, flesh, stone. Made of something else. Still itself.

The ending was kinda bullshit.

Pardon my foul language and potential spoilers. But bullshit.

Mattie is dead to the world without a key to her heart. Sebastian who felt she was an object suddenly decides to wait by her side? Why did Sedia go for the gothic imagery shit? Did she think it was a haunting image of the tragic metal and whale bone girl with a guy waiting by her side? Now mortal gargoyles flying over head to protect her while they still live? It wasn't. (Another book that pisses me off going for the rotting romantic image instead of what would have meant something. Into the Forest pissed me off enough for 2011, thanks. Why don't they ever listen to me?)

The gazes look away. Mattie doesn't get the chance to learn her definitions of friendship and love through experience, make her own variables. I didn't care as much who the parents were! WHY did they stare at Mattie and decide she was a cute little machine but then sit by her side at the end? The gargoyles had been honest in their whispers of staring, before. Now they owed her? Sighs. Sedia did quite well writing Mattie's chemical balances. Now what about the experience? Bullshit!

Four stars because of the voices of Do you really love me? all of the time. The more it is asked the less you are sure if you don't. How it feels when you are told you are soul mates when you don't know what that even means. Sedia got some stuff right. If only that was the asking I had wanted...