That was me! I've also taken a break since GG - I didn't realise that everyone had moved over here! Much preferring Tattle.I remember on GG - or perhaps it was here - there was a user who did a chapter by chapter account of In The Time We Lost (I might have miswrote the title) and it was thoroughly enjoyable!
I've said before but Carrie doesn't appear to have many friends. I'm not saying this is a bad thing and I know we don't see everything she does. However, I remember one time she blamed barely seeing her friends because of "work commitments" but we've all seen other West End actors do things with their free time.She posts this but with the exception of Scott she barely likes any of their IG posts or gives them much of a mention (except didn’t she promote Louise’s #gifted book?). Not a single like for Sophie’s Disenchanted show. She’ll say BOUNDARIES! I say it looks weird.
It was all about Mollie at one point but this is the first time she’s mentioned her in months or longer.
Surely you’d tag your boyfriend and your brother/sister-in-law in this, as well as friends. I can’t wait to spend garden time with my family. Seems odd that they aren’t the first people she’d think to tag in it?She posts this but with the exception of Scott she barely likes any of their IG posts or gives them much of a mention (except didn’t she promote Louise’s #gifted book?). Not a single like for Sophie’s Disenchanted show. She’ll say BOUNDARIES! I say it looks weird.
It was all about Mollie at one point but this is the first time she’s mentioned her in months or longer.
Surely you’d tag your boyfriend and your brother/sister-in-law in this, as well as friends. I can’t wait to spend garden time with my family. Seems odd that they aren’t the first people she’d think to tag in it?
She craves male attention. Her books are always filled with antagonists that are female and she talks about them as any pick me woman would.One thing that always sticks out to me regarding the jealousy/potential bitterness is the fact that she never mentioned that Celinde (who she was still super close with at the time) was in a major Hollywood movie. Now obviously not posting about something isn’t necessarily indicative of someone’s feelings, but this is Carrie ‘I’m going to live tweet my SIL on a reality show’ Fletcher we’re talking about. Look at how she’s singing Scott’s praises (as a friend should) for being on tv at the moment, and yet not a peep about Rocketman at the time.
Carrie strikes me as the kind of woman who sees other woman as competition subconsciously, for whatever reason. Maybe it stems from going to an all girls school, or just because she’s a competitive person by nature, who knows
I actually forgot there's supposed to be a ghost plot with all the petty love drama going on. Does Carrie know the basics of a three act plot structure?So here are the next few! There are less chapters in this post just because it makes sense with the story-these chapters are set in the present, and the next few are in the past, so I'll do them all together in the next post. I'm so glad so many of you are enjoying reading these and I really appreciate the kind words! I'm just having fun (well, sort of fun) but thank you for taking the time to write them! These next few chapters are some of my least favourite in the book, so please, enjoy
@DietGossip-Yes, she's called Olive Green! Seriously. I wasn't going to dignify her name with a comment on it lol. Carrie's names are usually like this; there's a character in On The Other Side called Sonny Shine, so after that, Olive Green sounds almost normal.
The first thing you need to know about Chapter Twelve is that, whatever it is is, it isn’t worth it. It wins the prize for the chapter I’ve hated the most so far; I haven’t been this angry since Olive’s “Not Like Other Girls” rant. I’ve returned to the Os real names for clarity but know that I’m saying them with the same distain as I said Orange and Onion. The whole chapter is just 1) Olive walks the last ten feet towards the theatre and sees Oscar 2) Oscar tell Tamara he’s not interested in her 3) Olive and Oscar have a chat in Olive’s dressing room which resolves nothing. That is well and truly it. Nothing in the plot moves forward, we don’t hear anything about the show, it’s just all Oscar-loves-Olive-not-Tamara-but-can’t-get-it-together, like we’ve heard a hundred times before. A whole chapter of these idiots talking in circles. I don’t remember getting this vexed the first time around, but maybe reading it more analytically has opened my eyes to its true pointlessness.
The thing is, a lot of it isn’t even written particularly badly, and that’s what’s so frustrating. Olive’s interaction with the barrister felt genuine, her feelings come across well, and her situation is relatable. It’s just boring subject matter which certainly wasn’t due an entire chapter. Oh, and of course, Tamara is written with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. This is a good opportunity to mention another general point about Carrie’s writing in this book; the handling of which point of view we’re following. Mostly, we switch between Olive and Oscar without so much as an asterisk to spilt them up. The other POV characters are Fawn and Walter. Sometimes we do get a clear page break, but generally, one paragraph is Olive’s POV and the next directly after is Oscar’s. I don’t mind that, although it’s not the clearest it could be, but suddenly, for no reason, and for just one sentence, we are suddenly following Tamara’s point of view. She is not a POV character, and I did wonder if I’d misunderstood, but I’m not going mad, we definitely get Tamara’s thoughts from inside her head, that Oscar had no way of knowing. It’s a bit clumsy, is all.
Anyway, so we’re supposed to look down on Tamara for wearing a pink coat now. Why do the “mean girls” always wear pink? We’re not even told whether it’s a Wednesday. Tamara’s dialogue is vapid to the point of parody. She speaks in short, simple sentences, never more than a few words long, and usually in the form of demands. I want to give props to Carrie for writing a character who doesn’t speak in exactly the same way as Olive, but it feels so mean-spirited. During her conversation with Oscar, she actually says, in response to Oscar telling her that he likes Olive: “You like me!” That’s the whole of her answer. Like an elementary school playground. Soon after, like the sexy mistress in a bad movie, she tells Oscar “You can kiss her and me.” As if Tamara would be okay with that after all her huffing and puffing over Oscar and Olive being together! It’s well established that she wants Oscar to herself. Her lack of morals here and willingness to be “the other woman” is just part of her cartoony characterisation.
So, for absolutely no reason other than to serve the narrative and to give Oscar a big realisation that he’s already had about twelve times, Tamara asks Oscar how he would feel if he saw Olive kiss someone else. This makes him realise wow, he actually would be gutted because he totally wuvs Olive so much. Again. So Oscar tells Tamara he wants Olive, and lo and behold, Olive was listening to the whole thing. Surely now, in this simplistic story structure, Olive should also have had this big realisation too that Oscar really does like her more than Tamara, and they should be skipping happily into the sunset? Nah. More contrived arguments. And they go on for sooooooooooo long. The rest of the chapter, in fact, is just one long conversation between Olive and Oscar. Oscar uses his get-out-of-jail-free card and says that he **technically** didn’t do anything wrong as they weren’t together, and in fairness, Olive is rightly pissed off. The scene reads almost like a script; loads of dialogue with little interludes of description. I would say that this is meant to symbolise a play within a play, but I’m not giving it that much credit. The upshot is, nothing has changed and the kiss with Tamara might as well have not happened, because these idiots are back where they started. They’re not on and not off, they still have feeling for each other, but they’re giving it a cooling off period before they try and define their relationship again.
So my question is WHAT WAS THE POINT? WHAT WAS THE POINT OF ANY OF THIS I WANT MY TIME BACK
I’ve calmed down.
Olive’s male friends in the cast offer to beat Oscar up for hurting her. Friends do make these jokey kinds of threats after a breakup-I know I have-but Olive’s reaction is weird. She says “Now, now boys.” to them, like she’s their fifty-year-old teacher and they’re kids in her class. It’s just so patronising. So…Olive. Oh, and Howard (one of the male friends. I’ve not mentioned him before now and you’ve not noticed him missing because he is basically Doug #2 with less personality) says “You’re a saint, Olive Green. A bloody saint.”. I’ve avoided saying Olive is literally Carrie before now, because I don’t think that’s fair, but this is Carrie as a writer calling her self-insert character (aka herself) a saint. Make what you will of that.
Anyway, it’s opening night and everyone’s excited. Oscar is miserable and staying pretty isolated from the rest of the cast, which is understandable, but they all rally around Olive because she is so lovely and special and perfect. Sammy (the dancer in the show that Jane and Tamora called a whale) hangs out in Olive’s dressing room to prove that she is capable of having female friends. It’s the first time I think in the whole book that Olive has interacted with a woman in a non-combative way. I’m going to talk about Sammy in a minute, but for now, just know that the conversation they have doesn’t pass the Bechdel test as it’s just a re-run of Olive’s convo with the boys earlier where they jokingly threaten Olive, mixed in with “you’re the nicest person in the world, Olive” and “give him another chance, because the rest of the cast have nothing better to do than speculate about your love lives!” That’s barely an exaggeration. It’s pretty much what she says.
After dinner, Olive introduces her friends to Walter. I’m a bit confused as to how none of them but Olive have met him before, as he’s always around the theatre. It did feel a little bit like “look at superstar Olive deigning to talk to the little people backstage, isn’t she a saint?” Anyway, it’s established again that the whole theatre has dodgy electrics, presumably because Fawn likes to mess with them. Olive has a present at stage door for her-two dozen roses, which she thinks must be from her agent (no prizes for guessing who really sent them).
But before we find out who the sender is, we get ANOTHER repeat of the let’s-kill-Oscar-but-give-him-another-chance conversation. This is our THIRD IN ONE CHAPTER. This time, it’s from Howard. I did want to give some credit where credit is due when it comes to this character. Carrie manages to introduce that Howard is gay without her usual “This is Howard. He is gay.”, which I respected. Props. If Carrie managed to flesh out all of her characters that subtly and well, I’d be writing a different review. But their conversation is just more of the same, really, with Howard’s take being “take him back but make him sweat”.
So Olive gets back to her dressing room, and find out to no one’s shock but hers that the roses are from Oscar, with a note asking her to meet him when the curtain falls (roll credits), just like Fawn and Walter did. At that moment, all the bulbs in Olive’s room burst, presumably courtesy of Fawn, who was probably rattled by the phrasing of the note. For some reason, Olive calls for a man to save her from the burst bulb, specifically Howard, but Oscar shows up. There’s another confusing change in point of view so vague I can’t actually pinpoint where we stop following Olive and start following Oscar.
A quick word about Sammy. Now, I like Sammy; I remember liking her the first time around too. Carrie writes her quite clumsily as “sassy”-basically, she says “honey” and “gurrl” a lot, but I appreciate the attempt. Here’s my hot take-Sammy should have been the protagonist. She’s a member of the ensemble, much more relatable than a leading lady, and her point of view wouldn’t have come down from a pedestal as a result. We could have got the Oscar/Olive drama through her if we really wanted, as she’s Olive’s friend, but she has a little lovestory herself with Doug that’s much more endearing (at this point in the book, we know they fancy each other, though they both rather sweetly deny it). She is bullied by Tamara and Jane, but stands up for herself. It’s implied that she’s a bigger woman (we don’t know how much bigger), trying to make it in theatre. We could have watched her overcoming the comments about her body and her insecurities in a brutal industry to find love with Doug, work hard, and have a wonderful career onstage. I want that book. Someone tell Carrie I’ve written her a sequel, hahaha.
The opening night show is about to begin! Carrie writes Olive’s excitement and nerves pretty well, as I’m sure she’s writing from experiences. This chapter starts with a few nudge-nudge wink-wink innuendos, which is fine I guess, but this is the first time in the book we’re seeing this, and Doug even says it’s out of character coming from Olive. It does feel disjointed. Still no straight answer as to whether there’s anything going on between Doug and Sammy, but I’m just glad there’s a universe outside of the two Os. After the show, everyone tells Oscar to get back with Olive. It’s basically round four of the same conversation, but this time to Oscar.
But wait, something weird is happening backstage! Olive’s clothes have gone missing-and so have Jane’s pearls (this was actually some clever foreshadowing so props)! Oscar and Olive go on a scavenger hunt to find her clothes, which we find out were stolen by g-g-g-ghosts! Oscar climbs a ladder by himself to retrieve her dress from the rafters, while SPEAKING OUT LOUD TO HIMSELF (oh thank goodness, I thought we’d moved on from that) about how ghosts don’t exist. Right on cue, a disembodied voice whispers “Osssssccccaaaaarrrrrr” and he understandably craps himself. Carrie actually writes this scene pretty well, so props. Fawn’s ghost then “puts on” the dress and communicates to him that Olive is in danger, and he needs Walter to help them. I don’t know why she needed to steal and put on the dress to do this, but I’m quite enjoying the scene, so I’ll let it happen. Fawn finishes with “HE’S COMING FOR HER” which is quite chilling. Again, props, it’s genuinely spooky. Maybe Carrie should start writing ghost stories full time instead of “magic realism”...
It’s the afterparty and the director tells Olive how well she did, which is fine, and maybe the first time in the book that someone is praising her with a reason to do so. Olive and Oscar talk about their relationship and Olive actually says “Everyone’s rooting for us”, as if the rest of the cast have nothing better to do except sit around and talk about their relationship. Which, as we know from Sammy, Doug, and Howard, they don’t. Olive is stull upset that their relationship is undefined and Oscar doesn’t want to commit, which is fair. Again, it’s a load of talking in circles, page after page of pretty much just dialogue, then they kiss.
But OH MY GOD FINALLY SOMETHING HAPPENS. It’s a horrible something, but a something none the less. So Doug has been crushed by a falling light-or light-rig, it’s not very clear. Anyway, point is, he’s been crushed, and Oscar quickly figures out from his experience that a ghost is to blame. The first time I read this, I thought he was dead, not in the least because Carrie constantly describes the scene as “Doug’s body”, which usually indicates that someone is dead, you know. But he’s still kicking, if grievously injured, and he might lose his arm. It’s absolutely terrible, especially for such a nice character, but sadly we don’t know him any better than knowing that he lives to praise Olive, so sadly there’s not much attachment. Now, there’s the climax for the Sammy story! Doug and Sammy working through the injury together and rebuilding their life and career, overcoming set-backs and coming out stronger. You know, like real people have to. Not the charmed lives of Octopus and Orangutan, neither of whom suffer ANY real setbacks in the book.
Anyway, Tamara jumps ship instantly, but Jane get a little bit of a redemption arc and calls the ambulance. It would have been lovely to see Tamara coming together with Olive to help, even though none of them can do very much-even the two of them sharing a little moment would have been great. I can’t hate Tamara too much for jumping ship-even though it’s not what I or other people would do, no one knows how they’d react in an emergency, even though the book demonises her for it.
However, I do have three big issues with the scene.
- It’s happened so quickly; despite it being the most dramatic thing to happen so far, it’s not given anything like the amount of words that Oscar and Olive’s stupid arguments are given. I’m not sure if Carrie just wanted to play down the gore, which is fine as I imagine most of her readers are young, but honestly it just feels like this potentially-career-ending injury for Doug isn’t anything like as important as these two idiots whining.
- When Fawn warned Oscar that Olive was in danger, she couldn’t have done a real solid and warned him about Doug too? Or was Doug just canon fodder? Chopped liver? Guess so…he’s not special like Olive so he doesn’t get guardian theatre angels. We find out that the ghost who hurt Doug thought he was someone else, which I guess could explain it, but still.
- We never find out whether Doug was okay. This book gets an epilogue and everything (WHICH I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT I’LL SHARE DOWN THE LINE), but not a word about poor Doug. Did he lose his arm? Did he work again? How much money did the production lose in the lawsuit? I guess it was an act of god, I mean ghost, but still. But STILL.
She's the best writer alive how dare you teach her anything to make her books good and readable.I actually forgot there's supposed to be a ghost plot with all the petty love drama going on. Does Carrie know the basics of a three act plot structure?
She is buying more... She's constantly loosing followers though. I did think her following had jumped up randomly. Look how many she bought!!Well she started posting selfies again and her follower number took a hit...
Will she buy new followers tho?
Haha I love this theory!Conspiracy theory: That was the perfect time for her to buy followers because people would assume she would get them from the tv appearance
2.5k followers for her rendition of the song sounds like a lot tbh
Here are the next few chapters! We're nearly at the end now-just the final chapter and the epilogue after these. Thank you to everyone for their kind words regarding this summary, and I hope you're all enjoying itSo here are the next few! There are less chapters in this post just because it makes sense with the story-these chapters are set in the present, and the next few are in the past, so I'll do them all together in the next post. I'm so glad so many of you are enjoying reading these and I really appreciate the kind words! I'm just having fun (well, sort of fun) but thank you for taking the time to write them! These next few chapters are some of my least favourite in the book, so please, enjoy
@DietGossip-Yes, she's called Olive Green! Seriously. I wasn't going to dignify her name with a comment on it lol. Carrie's names are usually like this; there's a character in On The Other Side called Sonny Shine, so after that, Olive Green sounds almost normal.
The first thing you need to know about Chapter Twelve is that, whatever it is is, it isn’t worth it. It wins the prize for the chapter I’ve hated the most so far; I haven’t been this angry since Olive’s “Not Like Other Girls” rant. I’ve returned to the Os real names for clarity but know that I’m saying them with the same distain as I said Orange and Onion. The whole chapter is just 1) Olive walks the last ten feet towards the theatre and sees Oscar 2) Oscar tell Tamara he’s not interested in her 3) Olive and Oscar have a chat in Olive’s dressing room which resolves nothing. That is well and truly it. Nothing in the plot moves forward, we don’t hear anything about the show, it’s just all Oscar-loves-Olive-not-Tamara-but-can’t-get-it-together, like we’ve heard a hundred times before. A whole chapter of these idiots talking in circles. I don’t remember getting this vexed the first time around, but maybe reading it more analytically has opened my eyes to its true pointlessness.
The thing is, a lot of it isn’t even written particularly badly, and that’s what’s so frustrating. Olive’s interaction with the barrister felt genuine, her feelings come across well, and her situation is relatable. It’s just boring subject matter which certainly wasn’t due an entire chapter. Oh, and of course, Tamara is written with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. This is a good opportunity to mention another general point about Carrie’s writing in this book; the handling of which point of view we’re following. Mostly, we switch between Olive and Oscar without so much as an asterisk to spilt them up. The other POV characters are Fawn and Walter. Sometimes we do get a clear page break, but generally, one paragraph is Olive’s POV and the next directly after is Oscar’s. I don’t mind that, although it’s not the clearest it could be, but suddenly, for no reason, and for just one sentence, we are suddenly following Tamara’s point of view. She is not a POV character, and I did wonder if I’d misunderstood, but I’m not going mad, we definitely get Tamara’s thoughts from inside her head, that Oscar had no way of knowing. It’s a bit clumsy, is all.
Anyway, so we’re supposed to look down on Tamara for wearing a pink coat now. Why do the “mean girls” always wear pink? We’re not even told whether it’s a Wednesday. Tamara’s dialogue is vapid to the point of parody. She speaks in short, simple sentences, never more than a few words long, and usually in the form of demands. I want to give props to Carrie for writing a character who doesn’t speak in exactly the same way as Olive, but it feels so mean-spirited. During her conversation with Oscar, she actually says, in response to Oscar telling her that he likes Olive: “You like me!” That’s the whole of her answer. Like an elementary school playground. Soon after, like the sexy mistress in a bad movie, she tells Oscar “You can kiss her and me.” As if Tamara would be okay with that after all her huffing and puffing over Oscar and Olive being together! It’s well established that she wants Oscar to herself. Her lack of morals here and willingness to be “the other woman” is just part of her cartoony characterisation.
So, for absolutely no reason other than to serve the narrative and to give Oscar a big realisation that he’s already had about twelve times, Tamara asks Oscar how he would feel if he saw Olive kiss someone else. This makes him realise wow, he actually would be gutted because he totally wuvs Olive so much. Again. So Oscar tells Tamara he wants Olive, and lo and behold, Olive was listening to the whole thing. Surely now, in this simplistic story structure, Olive should also have had this big realisation too that Oscar really does like her more than Tamara, and they should be skipping happily into the sunset? Nah. More contrived arguments. And they go on for sooooooooooo long. The rest of the chapter, in fact, is just one long conversation between Olive and Oscar. Oscar uses his get-out-of-jail-free card and says that he **technically** didn’t do anything wrong as they weren’t together, and in fairness, Olive is rightly pissed off. The scene reads almost like a script; loads of dialogue with little interludes of description. I would say that this is meant to symbolise a play within a play, but I’m not giving it that much credit. The upshot is, nothing has changed and the kiss with Tamara might as well have not happened, because these idiots are back where they started. They’re not on and not off, they still have feeling for each other, but they’re giving it a cooling off period before they try and define their relationship again.
So my question is WHAT WAS THE POINT? WHAT WAS THE POINT OF ANY OF THIS I WANT MY TIME BACK
I’ve calmed down.
Olive’s male friends in the cast offer to beat Oscar up for hurting her. Friends do make these jokey kinds of threats after a breakup-I know I have-but Olive’s reaction is weird. She says “Now, now boys.” to them, like she’s their fifty-year-old teacher and they’re kids in her class. It’s just so patronising. So…Olive. Oh, and Howard (one of the male friends. I’ve not mentioned him before now and you’ve not noticed him missing because he is basically Doug #2 with less personality) says “You’re a saint, Olive Green. A bloody saint.”. I’ve avoided saying Olive is literally Carrie before now, because I don’t think that’s fair, but this is Carrie as a writer calling her self-insert character (aka herself) a saint. Make what you will of that.
Anyway, it’s opening night and everyone’s excited. Oscar is miserable and staying pretty isolated from the rest of the cast, which is understandable, but they all rally around Olive because she is so lovely and special and perfect. Sammy (the dancer in the show that Jane and Tamora called a whale) hangs out in Olive’s dressing room to prove that she is capable of having female friends. It’s the first time I think in the whole book that Olive has interacted with a woman in a non-combative way. I’m going to talk about Sammy in a minute, but for now, just know that the conversation they have doesn’t pass the Bechdel test as it’s just a re-run of Olive’s convo with the boys earlier where they jokingly threaten Olive, mixed in with “you’re the nicest person in the world, Olive” and “give him another chance, because the rest of the cast have nothing better to do than speculate about your love lives!” That’s barely an exaggeration. It’s pretty much what she says.
After dinner, Olive introduces her friends to Walter. I’m a bit confused as to how none of them but Olive have met him before, as he’s always around the theatre. It did feel a little bit like “look at superstar Olive deigning to talk to the little people backstage, isn’t she a saint?” Anyway, it’s established again that the whole theatre has dodgy electrics, presumably because Fawn likes to mess with them. Olive has a present at stage door for her-two dozen roses, which she thinks must be from her agent (no prizes for guessing who really sent them).
But before we find out who the sender is, we get ANOTHER repeat of the let’s-kill-Oscar-but-give-him-another-chance conversation. This is our THIRD IN ONE CHAPTER. This time, it’s from Howard. I did want to give some credit where credit is due when it comes to this character. Carrie manages to introduce that Howard is gay without her usual “This is Howard. He is gay.”, which I respected. Props. If Carrie managed to flesh out all of her characters that subtly and well, I’d be writing a different review. But their conversation is just more of the same, really, with Howard’s take being “take him back but make him sweat”.
So Olive gets back to her dressing room, and find out to no one’s shock but hers that the roses are from Oscar, with a note asking her to meet him when the curtain falls (roll credits), just like Fawn and Walter did. At that moment, all the bulbs in Olive’s room burst, presumably courtesy of Fawn, who was probably rattled by the phrasing of the note. For some reason, Olive calls for a man to save her from the burst bulb, specifically Howard, but Oscar shows up. There’s another confusing change in point of view so vague I can’t actually pinpoint where we stop following Olive and start following Oscar.
A quick word about Sammy. Now, I like Sammy; I remember liking her the first time around too. Carrie writes her quite clumsily as “sassy”-basically, she says “honey” and “gurrl” a lot, but I appreciate the attempt. Here’s my hot take-Sammy should have been the protagonist. She’s a member of the ensemble, much more relatable than a leading lady, and her point of view wouldn’t have come down from a pedestal as a result. We could have got the Oscar/Olive drama through her if we really wanted, as she’s Olive’s friend, but she has a little lovestory herself with Doug that’s much more endearing (at this point in the book, we know they fancy each other, though they both rather sweetly deny it). She is bullied by Tamara and Jane, but stands up for herself. It’s implied that she’s a bigger woman (we don’t know how much bigger), trying to make it in theatre. We could have watched her overcoming the comments about her body and her insecurities in a brutal industry to find love with Doug, work hard, and have a wonderful career onstage. I want that book. Someone tell Carrie I’ve written her a sequel, hahaha.
The opening night show is about to begin! Carrie writes Olive’s excitement and nerves pretty well, as I’m sure she’s writing from experiences. This chapter starts with a few nudge-nudge wink-wink innuendos, which is fine I guess, but this is the first time in the book we’re seeing this, and Doug even says it’s out of character coming from Olive. It does feel disjointed. Still no straight answer as to whether there’s anything going on between Doug and Sammy, but I’m just glad there’s a universe outside of the two Os. After the show, everyone tells Oscar to get back with Olive. It’s basically round four of the same conversation, but this time to Oscar.
But wait, something weird is happening backstage! Olive’s clothes have gone missing-and so have Jane’s pearls (this was actually some clever foreshadowing so props)! Oscar and Olive go on a scavenger hunt to find her clothes, which we find out were stolen by g-g-g-ghosts! Oscar climbs a ladder by himself to retrieve her dress from the rafters, while SPEAKING OUT LOUD TO HIMSELF (oh thank goodness, I thought we’d moved on from that) about how ghosts don’t exist. Right on cue, a disembodied voice whispers “Osssssccccaaaaarrrrrr” and he understandably craps himself. Carrie actually writes this scene pretty well, so props. Fawn’s ghost then “puts on” the dress and communicates to him that Olive is in danger, and he needs Walter to help them. I don’t know why she needed to steal and put on the dress to do this, but I’m quite enjoying the scene, so I’ll let it happen. Fawn finishes with “HE’S COMING FOR HER” which is quite chilling. Again, props, it’s genuinely spooky. Maybe Carrie should start writing ghost stories full time instead of “magic realism”...
It’s the afterparty and the director tells Olive how well she did, which is fine, and maybe the first time in the book that someone is praising her with a reason to do so. Olive and Oscar talk about their relationship and Olive actually says “Everyone’s rooting for us”, as if the rest of the cast have nothing better to do except sit around and talk about their relationship. Which, as we know from Sammy, Doug, and Howard, they don’t. Olive is stull upset that their relationship is undefined and Oscar doesn’t want to commit, which is fair. Again, it’s a load of talking in circles, page after page of pretty much just dialogue, then they kiss.
But OH MY GOD FINALLY SOMETHING HAPPENS. It’s a horrible something, but a something none the less. So Doug has been crushed by a falling light-or light-rig, it’s not very clear. Anyway, point is, he’s been crushed, and Oscar quickly figures out from his experience that a ghost is to blame. The first time I read this, I thought he was dead, not in the least because Carrie constantly describes the scene as “Doug’s body”, which usually indicates that someone is dead, you know. But he’s still kicking, if grievously injured, and he might lose his arm. It’s absolutely terrible, especially for such a nice character, but sadly we don’t know him any better than knowing that he lives to praise Olive, so sadly there’s not much attachment. Now, there’s the climax for the Sammy story! Doug and Sammy working through the injury together and rebuilding their life and career, overcoming set-backs and coming out stronger. You know, like real people have to. Not the charmed lives of Octopus and Orangutan, neither of whom suffer ANY real setbacks in the book.
Anyway, Tamara jumps ship instantly, but Jane get a little bit of a redemption arc and calls the ambulance. It would have been lovely to see Tamara coming together with Olive to help, even though none of them can do very much-even the two of them sharing a little moment would have been great. I can’t hate Tamara too much for jumping ship-even though it’s not what I or other people would do, no one knows how they’d react in an emergency, even though the book demonises her for it.
However, I do have three big issues with the scene.
- It’s happened so quickly; despite it being the most dramatic thing to happen so far, it’s not given anything like the amount of words that Oscar and Olive’s stupid arguments are given. I’m not sure if Carrie just wanted to play down the gore, which is fine as I imagine most of her readers are young, but honestly it just feels like this potentially-career-ending injury for Doug isn’t anything like as important as these two idiots whining.
- When Fawn warned Oscar that Olive was in danger, she couldn’t have done a real solid and warned him about Doug too? Or was Doug just canon fodder? Chopped liver? Guess so…he’s not special like Olive so he doesn’t get guardian theatre angels. We find out that the ghost who hurt Doug thought he was someone else, which I guess could explain it, but still.
- We never find out whether Doug was okay. This book gets an epilogue and everything (WHICH I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT I’LL SHARE DOWN THE LINE), but not a word about poor Doug. Did he lose his arm? Did he work again? How much money did the production lose in the lawsuit? I guess it was an act of god, I mean ghost, but still. But STILL.
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