IN A GARDEN BURNING GOLD read-along and recap, pt 2
chapters 11 through 20 with behind the scenes
welcome back to the recap read-along of IN A GARDEN BURNING GOLD! this section will take us to the halfway mark of the book and i’m very very curious to hear if any of y’all have predictions for what’s to come!
before we get into it, as a reminder this read-along will finish up the friday before the sequel comes out — if you haven’t ordered your copy of it yet you can do that below AND you can mark your calendar for the ORCHARD launch event at porter square books!
also don’t forget to read the footnotes that’s where some Good Stuff is okay yes let’s go
RECAP
Chapter Eleven
so last we left off rhea had picked her new consort Michali the son of a Steward up in the northeast of the country and in this chapter she’s on her way! michali is not… the most scintillating of conversationalists (and i mean fair enough he IS trapped in a carriage with someone he knows is gonna kill him in like 2 months) and rhea is like oh boy this is gonna be a rough one huh
on the way they also have to cross a river12 at a spot where mercenaries are known to pick off anyone traveling with some kind of wealth
oh no! as they cross rhea and michali are (mildly) AMBUSHED! shock horror except michali seems like he kiiiiind of knew that was gonna happen and rhea is pretty sure that it was a setup to get her to trust him more and if she had a magnifying glass and a fedora and a trench coat she would put them on at this point like “i’m gonna get to the bottom of this”
a regular gumshoe
Chapter Twelve
michali and rhea arrive in Ksigori the capital city in the region michali’s family handles and rhea is shown around the city before she’s taken to michali’s house on the island in the center of the city lake
there she meets michali’s mom evanthia3 an absolute queen
she also gets a letter from lexos via his fancy robot carrier pigeon being like “hey keep a lookout for this weird coin thing some separatists have been seen carrying/exchanging/collecting possibly like pokemon cards”
Chapter Thirteen
rhea and michali get married according to ksigori custom and michali makes rhea laugh and uh oh. too bad he’s gotta die later right
Chapter Fourteen
back at Stratathoma lexos is moping bc rhea’s gone but luckily he and Baba are due at Agiokon4 for a meeting of all the Stratagiozis from the various countries in the federation
agiokon is under the control of Zita Devetsi and her daughter Stavra5 who are the Baba and Lexos respectively of their own country and the Devetsis play host to Baba and Lexos whenever they’re visiting
we also hear from lexos about saint worship, an outlawed practice—the saints lived like 1000 years ago and were magical in much the same way the Stratagiozis are now BUT they were then all murdered by one of their own Luco Domina in a real girlboss moment and luco then made himself the first Stratagiozi and banned all worship of the dead saints/ordered all churches destroyed. in the 1000 years since then not every ruler has been super strict about banning saint worship but Baba is like VERY aggro about it (which makes it all the more awkward that his dead consort/the kids’ mom was a saint worshipper before she died)
as everybody preps for the Stratagiozi meeting, lexos and stavra hang out for a little and stavra lets lexos know that she’s heard some Bad Shit about the situation in thyzakos and that the Stewards who serve Baba seem to be prepping to depose him
yikes
Chapter Fifteen
it’s time for the big meeting! i will skip the geopolitical details6 and highlight the two most important things
tarro domina makes an entrance! tarro is the head of Trefazio, the richest and most powerful country in the federation, and is a direct descendant of luco domina
Baba makes a huge fool of himself at the meeting and lexos has to step in and cover for him
Chapter Sixteen
lexos getting back to stratathoma: honey i’m home
nitsos with a dangerous gleam in his eyes standing over the alarmingly elaborate lego set he has had ample time to put together: i haven’t seen the sun in 100 years
Chapter Seventeen
we’re back with rhea! she’s been hanging out with michali and is definitely definitely not offended that he hasn’t tried to make out with her
on an outing to the city’s best eel eatery rhea takes in the sights and also takes in (kind of for the first time) the fact that most people in the region absolutely fucking hate her and that most of her consorts probably DON’T enjoy being killed
she also spots the ruins of a saint’s church in the city’s main square and is like ???? that looks like it came down relatively recently instead of 1000 years ago when that shit was banned? hmmm. i must investigate
Chapter Eighteen
first: rhea finds michali’s Not-So-Secret Saints Memorabilia Collection
second: rhea finds michali’s… personality a little endearing uh oh
third: rhea finds the COIN from lexos’s LETTER in michali’s pocket! time to sneak out in the middle of the night!!! like i said a regular gumshoe
Chapter Nineteen
rhea sneaks out of the house late at night and discovers a Secret Entrance ™ in the ruins of the church!!! the coin is a key! ooooooh!!!!
the entrance leads to a waystation for the Sxoriza, the separatist movement lexos was worried about (although if you asked them i don’t think separatist is the word they would choose to describe themselves)
rhea does some snooping around only to realize that michali 100% heard her sneaking out and in fact followed her there wOOPS! the two have a conversation and pretty much level with each other like “okay so yes i’m the head of a movement trying to get rid of your dad and yes you’re here to spy on me and then kill me but more important you accidentally put on a pair of my pants when you got dressed in the dark and i would like those back”7
rhea suggests that she might be open to hearing more about michali’s point of view (that is a lie) (or is it) and they agree to a tentative truce for the time being
Chapter Twenty
rhea accompanies michali on a trip to a village up in the mountains and is shocked to learn that this village has a saint’s church! a still-standing church!
she goes in while michali’s off doing… whatever it is that he does… and finds a saint’s portrait that’s been set up for worship (remember that photograph from last week’s post) and ohhhh my god the portrait is of her MOM? mom was a SAINT?
okay we are done with this week’s section and wow it’s been a big couple days for rhea! but while she’s really stepping outside the family for the first time lexos is more and more tangled up in it
surely nothing bad will happen to him because of it
additional thoughts
we’ve reached the halfway point and we’ve hit the first two chapters of what make up rhea’s crucial Turn
her turn is really the centerpiece of her arc in this book and the hardest thing for me as i wrote it was creating some distance between rhea’s experience and the reader’s impression of her experience
that is—rhea comes through this feeling very sincerely changed, but it was my hope that a reader will remain… skeptical? doubtful? perhaps the best word is just. “iffy”
but that’s a tricky kind of space to create with this POV style. rhea is written in close third (although i wouldn’t say it’s the CLOSEST third possible but still. close) and to survive growing up with Baba she’s had to avoid almost any kind of self-reflection—if she looks at herself or her life too closely she’ll start to see all the things that have gone to rot, and all the things she’s tolerated in the name of survival. so she doesn’t exactly have the tools to wonder about her own sincerity or be like “hmmm am i just looking for something that feels better than my current situation and maybe i don’t actually Mean It? and maybe my definition of Meaning It is focused around self-preservation instead of what might be Good or Right?” when she’s considering the Sxoriza
which MEANS that the narration doesn’t have the tools to do that either without splitting away from rhea in a way it hasn’t before and won’t again
so while the sequel has more room to expand on rhea’s arc and on the repercussions of making decisions the way that she does, in the actual moment itself—her in the church/what’s to come in the next couple chapters—i had to rely on other techniques to get across some degree of subjectivity or unreliability, and there are two that i find myself using both in this book and in my YAs8
filter words
defining a filter word depends on usage but things like “seem” or “realize” or “almost” or “felt” can operate as one—basically it’s a word that stands as a filter between the reader and the immediate events of the story
“rhea could see michali picking up the book” instead of “michali picked up the book”
or “he seemed to shrug it off” instead of “he shrugged it off”
“he looked almost angry” instead of “he looked angry” or “he frowned” or some other direct action that implies anger
it’s pretty common writing advice to take these out because if you do you can create a more immediate/dramatic/concise experience for the reader
i hate this advice i’m sorry!!! just like any other word word a filter word can have a function on the page and “delete them no matter what” does not work for me
yes filter words can create distance but in GARDEN the distance between you and rhea—between rhea and what she is seeing—is there for a reason. michali might seem to shrug something off but does he actually? is rhea’s assessment correct? does SHE believe it?
to me they’re little flags that are like hey just remember you’re getting all this information through one person with her own particular quirks and opinions
rhetorical questions
on the one hand i’m trying to use less of these in what i’m writing at the moment because it drives me up the wall to see too many question marks in a paragraph
on the other they are SO HANDY!!!!! bc yes it’s a way of clearly guiding the reader through a POV character’s line of thinking but also when the character asks themselves a question, there are multiple possible answers—the one they clearly are filling in, but also the OPPOSITE and also a whole bunch of others! for the POV character it can be a way to reinforce their decision (“What else could she do but say yes?”) but for the reader it’s like… well i can think of one thing you could do but say yes. say no. or say literally anything else.
of course i can say “this is what i intended” but that doesn’t mean it was successful or that that’s what you took away from the page! but i thought it might be cool to chat a little about what i was going for
going into the second half of the book i would love to know your predictions or theories for what might happen! any settings you think we’ll visit? characters you think we’ll see again? will nitsos ever go outside the grounds of stratathoma? fire away
next time: chapters 21-30, april 21
why yes i DID grow up rewatching the arwen rescues frodo scene in fellowship why do you ask
also the river i took inspo from is the Voidomatis (the river’s name in the book combines Voidomatis with Vikos, the name of a gorge in the real-life area) which is so fucking cold i cannot express to you how next level cold it is and it has a really gorgeous blue/green color to it that almost makes up for how cold it is bc idk if you knew but it’s like. very cold
evanthia is named after the protagonist in a book my mom drafted on-and-off as i grew up (before eventually debuting with a different project) but i was always too young to read it so all i remember about what happened is that on one page somebody snapped a chicken’s neck. like for cooking tho not just for fun
generally speaking my approach to worldbuilding is more “start writing and see what you need to know as you build the story.” some people develop a lot of backstory or history or detail that never makes it onto the page buuuuut that’s never really been me? idk why it just isn’t except in the case of agiokon and one other setting you’ll see in the sequel. i really don’t know what it was about this particular spot—like certainly part of it is that its history is important to how it functions in the plot, but i also just liked thinking about it even outside the bounds of the story and how it’s a city that in the world of the book used to be kind of like the Vatican but now is supposed to just be ur basic Manhattan except Manhattan if the top of the empire state building was like. the pope’s house or something? idk the simile got away from me
but agiokon is really a combo of like Istanbul/Constantinople, Meteora, the aforementioned Vatican, and probably some other stuff i’m forgetting
stavra!!!!! stavra is one of my FAVORITE characters and it sounds weird to be like “i wish i could’ve written more scenes with her in them” bc like. it’s your book? if you want to write scenes with her, just put more scenes with her into the book? but the book is so heavily focused on the Argyros family (and specifically on the kids, and then even more specifically on the twins) that it just… didn’t seem to fit for pretty much ANY secondary character to hang out around the twins for too long (michali being the exception but even then i think he kind of flickers? in a way?) but basically like you know those time lapse videos where someone stands still and everything moves around them? that is the vibe of the book for me like the camera and the twins are stationary and the world is moving around them rather than the camera moving WITH the twins through the world—they’ve spent the last 100 years with a hugely static view of themselves and the world and they haven’t prioritized looking outside themselves and i wanted the way the book operates to replicate that
the vitmar gets its first mention here - it will be somewhat important later on and takes on a much bigger role in the sequel! you can find a hundred examples of a conflict like this in real-world history (and in the present, certainly) but the one i was looking at most when designing something for the Strats to bargain over was the Sudetenland and its history going back at least as far as the 1900s
i remember when i first sent this book to my agents i asked them “is it too funny” and that’s the most RIDICULOUS question of all time bc NO???? this book isn’t funny at ALL?? but i think what i meant was that there’s more room for moments of levity or even just like. dryness or wryness in the narration that my YA books really don’t have the space or tone for and that was new ground for me. like i think there’s one (1) joke in wilder girls and margot from burn our bodies down has never laughed in her whole life
i don’t think of any of my narrators across my books as truly unreliable narrators (except maybe byatt but she’s trying to be better about that lmao) but i think they all have an element of like… “there are things i will always pay more attention to than i necessarily should”