“I’ll tell you a secret, Hanna. The really bad monsters never look like monsters.”
For the uninitiated, Kaz is a kind of a bad guy. You know the type as you see them every day around you: a thief always attired in black leather gloves and carrying a menacing cane. Let’s face it: you can’t really sell yourself as the heroic type out to save the universe if you always wear black gloves and dally with cane topped by a crow’s head. Also of import: Hanna is a little girl. A highly impressionable and reasonably gullible little girl willing to believe that a guy like Kaz isn’t necessarily to be distrusted. So what we have here is an underlying theme of the book as metaphor. The reader is the little girl and Kaz is the author. Work it out and you will find enjoyment of the book increases.
Nina heaped a plate with food and plunked down beside Matthias on the couch. She folded one of the waffles in half and took a huge bite, wiggling her toes in bliss.
This may seem like a strange quote to pluck from a 500-plus page long novel for special treatment. And, frankly, if this were almost any other 500-plus page long novel that assumption would be right on the nose. But there is something about waffles in this book that makes the breakfast food staple even more important than it is to Invader Zim. One certainly doesn’t want get hyperbolic and suggest that without the persistence of waffles the whole concept would fall apart, but then again waffles—particularly the act of consuming them—is mentioned a remarkable number of times throughout the breadth of the thick width of this book. What could be the meaning? Only time, the commitment to reading all 500-plus pages, and attention to detail with a talent for making thematic connections will reveal the true significance of waffles to the story.
“I would come for you. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we’d fight our way out together—knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that’s what we do. We never stop fighting.”
Remember that whole deal about bad monsters never looking like monsters? Well, it might work both ways. Maybe—just maybe, understand—a guy going around dressed in tight leather gloves while carrying a cane that Al Pacino might have rejected as just a little too over the top for his character in The Devil’s Advocate is not necessarily all bad. After all, is thievery really even that bad a criminal activity? Doesn’t it depend upon context: who you are stealing from matters as much as the fact that you are stealing from them, right? Kaz is complicated. At least, that is, complicated as far as such characters in this genre go. Do not expect Raskolnikov-level complexity, but as revealed here, a thief in black gloves carrying a scary cane is not necessarily the really bad monster he might look like.
