A Madness So Discreet

“It’s a madness so discreet that it can walk the streets and be applauded in some circles, but it is madness nonetheless.”

“Dear child, do you even know all the rage that is inside you?”

“It’s established; you’re insane.”
“And therefore I am not human,”

Their chalkboard had always consisted of black and white, but the reality was gray, and she struggled with the pain of learning it.

“Yours is a story whose events happen more often than are told. Tales like these belong to the black, do they not? Where they can’t be seen or heard.”

“What’s been done to you, then?” he asked, as if expecting an answer. “Or what have you seen that you’ve gone to the abyss so young?”

“There’s fresh blood spilling, Grace. And we must see which way it flows!”

“Seems a bit calmer, almost,” Reed observed, leaning toward her.
“Yes, they do that sometimes when you treat them like people,”

The meticulous nature of the planner can be misleading. If you have a killer who, say, drains the blood from all their victims, or removes the left hand consistently, the untrained want to say they are insane. But the definition of insanity—an inability to use rational thought—immediately precludes that they must, in fact, be sane.

But how can I find fault with your deeds when without them our paths would never have crossed?

“Ah, contentment,” Thornhollow said. “A wholly underrated feeling.”

“If you perform an action while learning something, re-creating the action may help you recall it later.”

There is more to you than beauty. There is more to you than strength. There is more to you than intelligence. You are a whole person, and I would have you treat yourself as such.

“’E’s a poor drunkard up the hill,” Nell said. “’Is family put ’im away for loving the bottle.”
“He also did say he was drinking them because Jesus was trapped in the bottoms,” Janey put in.
“If I were Jaysus, that’s where I’d go,” Nell said, tipping her glass again.

“I have no shame in String. I’d rather live where String can be String and I can be me without having to pretend I’m something else.”

“Yes, a bit like sisters, I suppose,” Elizabeth said. “Affection tinged with suffering.”

"They work their discreet types of madness on us, power and pain, and we hold to our truths in the darkness.

They all had their terrors.

Grace has given up on speech a long time ago. Once the words no and stop had done nothing, the others refused to come out, their inadequacy making the effort necessary to voice them an equation too easily resolved.

Grace had learned long ago that the true horror's of this world were other people.

There's the blood of another on you, though. I smell a splatter or two, underneath your own. You didn't come here without a fight, did you?

Actual rating: 3.4

"It’s a madness so discreet that it can walk the streets and be applauded in some circles, but it is madness nonetheless.”

Welcome to asylum of 1800s (we don't have the specific date the story takes place). It looks something like this one the outside

And like this on the inside

Wayburne Lunatic Asylum of Boston is a place our heroine Grace Mae ended up in after she was shipped off by her relatives.

“The signature of one judge and the word of a male family member and that’s that.” She snapped her fingers. “You’re insane.”

When Grace met Dr. Thornhollow, he was presenting lobotomy on the most exuberant patients. It made them more happier, or more accurate, it made them forget all their memories and feelings and just exist.

Grace watched with a keen eye as the insane went into the dark room at the end of the passage like feral animals and walked out led by Reed, simple and trusting as children. If the slackness of their faces was off-putting, the dead calm of their eyes offset it, promising that the tumult that had once raged within was now at rest.

I must add that characters are rather hard to connect with. For example when Grace cruelly murdered the serial killer in cold blood. I get that she turned off her emotions and did not realize fully what she was doing, but there were no consequences for her actions, and her remorse was not very convincing. I'd say Grace is a rather selfish person and sometimes I wanted to slap her soundly. Again, this line between good and bad is very murky with Grace. She can see things for others are harder to notice. Granted, she was in the asylum and saw terrible things and I can understand this pull of the darkness.

“Doctor, it is my weakness. I see everything; I notice all and I remember—the beautiful and the horrific alike I can recall as easily as a daguerreotype that can’t be unseen. It will be the death of me, this remembering.”

“I think we're all quite mad. Some of us are just more discreet about it.”

“These are your friends now, Grace Mae. A madman who eats cancer in the dark and another who searches for a different kind of killer, the kind that smiles at you in the light of day. This is your new life. I hope you can stand it.”

“Grace had learned long ago that
the true horrors of this world were other people.”

First, the scarily accurate representation of how people with mental health issues is disturbing at best. But this is a good thing, it means the author has certainly done her homework, and has managed to create this terrible, yet all too real atmosphere inside the asylum.

Things in the beginning are quite slow, and of course very depressing. Again, I think it really sets the tone for how Grace would have really been feeling, because the asylum was awful, and mundane, and endless. So it does work in the context of the story. In fact, even though it was a slower  start, I still could not put the book down. Slow and depressing, yes, but also wildly captivating. When Grace finally gets out of Boston, things definitely get a bit more intense and lighter as she is joined by a much more jovial (and quirky) cast of characters.

Two major aspects of the story stood out for me: