Sunday, February 8, 2015

The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (continued)

 Continuing from where I left off. The cook who Marten Knockers hired is having trouble doing all the work by herself in a really big house including taking care of the children, Jocelyn and Meline. Marten doesn't do a very good job at taking care of his nieces since he's never cared for children before. It seems like Mrs. Mendelbaum, the cook, is the only one worrying about the kids. In the book, Mendelbaum and Marten have an argument about this. After Marten says that what they do is none of their business, Mendelbaum states, "Not out business? Whose business should it be, I'd like to know?" This eventually led to Mendelbaum asking to hire a butler for the house. Hesitant, Marten agreed but only if she did the advertising and interviewing, he wanted no part in it. She agreed and got right to it. After a lot of interviewing she still never was satisfied, mainly because she was terrible at interviewing. She is an old german lady and, according to Meline, when she gets nervous her german accent gets stronger. At one point one of the people got her irritated and when asking for help from the girls she yelled, "Don't talk to ZEM. Zey are just silly gells." This made the man confused thinking she just called them seagulls.

 One thing that I noticed in the book is a change in one of the character's actions. As a signpost this would be called Contrast and Contradiction. This doesn't change the story all that much as far as I know so I didn't include it in the summary. Meline begins to notice Jocelyn leaving the house at around 8:00 PM every night to the woods. Her being bored and curious follows her into the woods and sees her sit on a rock and sob. Jocelyn, when first met, wasn't showing much emotion towards her parents' death, but as we see here she clearly does feel sad for what happened. After all, she was there when the train crashed. Jocelyn tries to cheer her up by suggesting something to do but nothing comes to mind. That's where I stopped reading so I don't know much more.

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