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A review by kaetheluise_nckl
Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan
5.0
written on 06/02/2019
You know what you are getting yourself into the minute you open this book. You read the author's note at the beginning and you know, the least this book is going to be is an emotional roller-coaster.
I am going to be quite honest, this book made me feel sick to my stomach. But when reading a book that deals with a topic as important and present in modern society as rape, then I am allowed to feel sick to the stomach.
In Girls of Paper and Fire, I found an aspiring, fast-paced and magical story that broke my heart every couple of pages and then slowly pieced it back together - over and over.
Lei's experiences are unlike I have ever read about and I am, in all honesty, beyond happy that they are only fiction. - But that obviously doesn't make them less real; because we all know that there are girls out there who are going through the emotional trauma of an aftermath of rape just like Lei.
I feel it is only fair that in Wren, Lei finds someone who truly and without exceptions loves her.
They are both such fierce and strong ladies going through so many truly horrible things at such a young age.
I kept remembering that Wren is only 18 and that I too am 18, so if I lived in a less secluded village, I might run my fate just like the two of them do.
There are a couple of things that really struck me while I was reading.
Barely 20 pages into the book, Natasha killed the dog, and with Bao, Lei's childhood faded away and she was, so suddenly and without mercy forced to become a woman. The death of that dog also sets the tone of the story in an unmistakable way.
The lore and world-building made it pretty obvious that humans are not worthy of the things they are receiving. Paper Caste is a term more degrading than you initially think, but once you realize that you can destroy something as brittle as paper in so many different ways, it becomes more and more obvious. To break paper, you don't need brute strength. Even a child could tear a sheet apart with its hands.
When you break paper, you can use tape to temporarily fix it, but it will never be the same because it will have been torn. When you rape a girl, that girl will, eventually and with a lot of help, come to "go back to normal" - only it never will, because by forcing yourself upon a (young) woman and taking her virginity, you also take a part of her soul and her drive to live life as she did before. Mistress Eira is a perfect example of that; I cannot imagine what suffering she is going through having to witness all these young girls share her fate.
Saying that sexually pleasing a man is "the greatest honor" is such a mean thing to say because there are very few women who would wish such a fate on another woman. When a man forces himself onto a woman, he gets pleasure from it, and at that moment, to that man, it is all that matters.
But for the woman, what matters is that it happened and it cannot be undone. And you are forced to live with it.
I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen in GoSaS, but I hope that Wren will be the tape to Lei's paper and that Lei will be the same for Wren in return.
This book features a strong and mutual romance between two young girls that will teach young girls so much more than that it is more than okay to fall in love with another girl because while the romance is important, to me, it was not the main focus by far.
Girls of Paper and Fire is a book that will teach girls to be (self-)aware and to fight for what they believe is right.
You know what you are getting yourself into the minute you open this book. You read the author's note at the beginning and you know, the least this book is going to be is an emotional roller-coaster.
I am going to be quite honest, this book made me feel sick to my stomach. But when reading a book that deals with a topic as important and present in modern society as rape, then I am allowed to feel sick to the stomach.
In Girls of Paper and Fire, I found an aspiring, fast-paced and magical story that broke my heart every couple of pages and then slowly pieced it back together - over and over.
Lei's experiences are unlike I have ever read about and I am, in all honesty, beyond happy that they are only fiction. - But that obviously doesn't make them less real; because we all know that there are girls out there who are going through the emotional trauma of an aftermath of rape just like Lei.
I feel it is only fair that in Wren, Lei finds someone who truly and without exceptions loves her.
They are both such fierce and strong ladies going through so many truly horrible things at such a young age.
I kept remembering that Wren is only 18 and that I too am 18, so if I lived in a less secluded village, I might run my fate just like the two of them do.
There are a couple of things that really struck me while I was reading.
Barely 20 pages into the book, Natasha killed the dog, and with Bao, Lei's childhood faded away and she was, so suddenly and without mercy forced to become a woman. The death of that dog also sets the tone of the story in an unmistakable way.
The lore and world-building made it pretty obvious that humans are not worthy of the things they are receiving. Paper Caste is a term more degrading than you initially think, but once you realize that you can destroy something as brittle as paper in so many different ways, it becomes more and more obvious. To break paper, you don't need brute strength. Even a child could tear a sheet apart with its hands.
When you break paper, you can use tape to temporarily fix it, but it will never be the same because it will have been torn. When you rape a girl, that girl will, eventually and with a lot of help, come to "go back to normal" - only it never will, because by forcing yourself upon a (young) woman and taking her virginity, you also take a part of her soul and her drive to live life as she did before. Mistress Eira is a perfect example of that; I cannot imagine what suffering she is going through having to witness all these young girls share her fate.
Saying that sexually pleasing a man is "the greatest honor" is such a mean thing to say because there are very few women who would wish such a fate on another woman. When a man forces himself onto a woman, he gets pleasure from it, and at that moment, to that man, it is all that matters.
But for the woman, what matters is that it happened and it cannot be undone. And you are forced to live with it.
I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen in GoSaS, but I hope that Wren will be the tape to Lei's paper and that Lei will be the same for Wren in return.
This book features a strong and mutual romance between two young girls that will teach young girls so much more than that it is more than okay to fall in love with another girl because while the romance is important, to me, it was not the main focus by far.
Girls of Paper and Fire is a book that will teach girls to be (self-)aware and to fight for what they believe is right.