Their story is also told in verse, making for a compelling and unique way to bring to life his character.Īll three of these characters give the story dimension and highlight how real they are. The Cat is such a chilling perspective because they are this third lens of storytelling, giving an artistic and thoughtful third eye to the story. However, there is also a third personality that the readers get to follow along this journey: the Cat. Writing such as that should never go unnoticed. Those feelings reverberate off the pages and cling to the reader. Tress and Felicity are not black or white characters they are multidimensional, full of faults, dreams, guilt, and heartache. It allows the reader to become invested in the underlining mystery of the disappearance of the Montor’s. This way of storytelling gives readers depth to the characters and their dynamics with one another. The story propels itself forward by the way they remember the past.

Those memories build up the suspense and the characterization, highlighting how Felicity has become a “bad” person by staying silent while others tear down Tress. Both girls are forced to face the past, see the lies, the secrets, and the truths behind them. It is an incredible scene felt throughout the story as their memories push the story forward. She plans to wall her inside this condemned building unless Felicity tells her the truth about her parents’ disappearance. This build-up reveals itself early on, but the impact it has on the reader happens when Tress knocks her out and ties her up. Tress has not been fortunate, all of it going towards Felicity, so there is a build-up of tension between the two.

All they saw was an orphan sent to live with her grandfather at his zoo. When her parents vanished, taking Felicity home one night, Tress stopped caring about how people viewed her. This ends up harming Tress’s life, which is already in shambles. Felicity is so wrapped up in her mothers’ vanity and nonsense that she loses her voice and sense of self. It is insightful to see how focusing on how you look and what people think of you instead of being true to yourself and tear you apart. They live in a small town where appearance is everything, making this town full of entitled, petty, and unhappy people. A big part of what makes this novel so good is how the author interprets Edgar Allan Poe’s work and can weave it into her own story seamlessly.įollowing the lives of Tress Montor and Felicity Turnado, the story goes back and forth between them, exploring the facets of their lives, how they see the world, and how the world looks at them. The Initial Insult is an incredible novel.

The initial insult book