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The Boundless Sublime
Actual Rating 2.5After the recent loss of her little brother, Ruby Galbraith is floundering, and her mum is having an even harder time functioning.When you lose someone.
Lose. People say that a lot, when someone dies. I’m sorry for your loss.
It makes it sound careless, as if my brother were a door key or umbrella, left behind on the train.
And the worst part is, they’re right. I was careless. It was me. My loss. I lost him.
She doesn’t talk about how she’s coping with anyone – with the school counselor, with her friends, with her mum – and the only way she can shut her brain off enough to sleep is by sneaking into nightclubs and dancing until she is exhausted.She stopped going to work and answering the phone, and pulled the curtains of her sorrow tightly around herself. She sat all day in the living room, staring at the TV and smoking cigarette after cigarette. Sometimes I’d come home from school and find her, vacant-eyed, with a perfect cylinder of as protruding from pale lips. I’d speak to her, tell her about my day and the outside world, and it would take minutes for the cylinder to tremble and collapse, spilling ash down the front of her dressing-gown.
And then she meets Fox, he sees her, he understands the dark hole that she finds herself in, and he gives her hope enough to start to pull herself back out.I welcomed the dark, frenetic facelessness of the dance floor. Nobody stared at me with sympathetic frowns wrinkling their brows. Nobody offered understanding hugs. Nobody shifted their weight uncomfortably as they tried to work out what to say. On the dance floor, I wasn’t Ruby Jane Galbraith. I was just a body, jumping and writhing with all the other bodies. I wasn’t anybody at all.
But he’s only in town for a short time, and has to return to the Institute where he lives… He asks Ruby to go with him. He’s not ready to lose her already, and she’s not ready to let go of the one person who has made her feel… anything since her brother died.A jolt somewhere inside me made my knees weak. It had been a long time since I’d felt anything. For the briefest of moments, a spark flared in the darkness.
The boy’s eyes were soft and brown, and full of concern and… recognition. I had the oddest feeling that he’d been waiting for me. That we’d been waiting for each other.
‘He’s looking at you,’ said Minah. ‘The hot wild angel boy is looking at you.’
So she ends up at the Institute of the Boundless Sublime, where a man who likes everyone to call him Daddy and claims he’s thousands of years old gives her a new name and tells her she’s extraordinary.Maggie elbowed me in the ribs. ‘You’re going to hear some crazy stuff over the next few days,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Some of it is pretty extreme. Just… go with it. It’s easier than making a fuss. I find it helps to understand it all as a kind of metaphor for life, you know? It’s like the Bible. All the woo-woo is there to help us to process those ideas.’
‘Right,’ I said, feeling suddenly nervous.
There are all kinds of new rules to learn and the institute – about food, and possessions, and romantic feelings – and what might seem, at first, to be a gathering of like-minded people working towards a common goal, is quickly revealed to be something rather more sinister.The Scintilla will come and light the way for us. The Institute of the Boundless Sublime will rise above all. The Quintus Septum will be vanquished, along with all their pathetic meat-followers. We shall rule the planet, gods of light and science. You, my children, will receive riches and power beyond your wildest imaginings.
And I will be everyone’s Daddy.
Daddy says they’re free to leave at any time, but does he really mean it?
The rest of this review can be found HERE!