Overally, I liked this book, but I feel like one of the author’s intentions really fell flat, hurting the book badly. Specially, her attempt to redeem Daisy.
Daisy has always been the one obsessed with her looks, never really contributes, and it’s frustrating to practically everyone at Icehome. This is a fact. Ruby tried to explain this away with Daisy’s past and conditioning, trying to tell us that this was a survival mechanism.
Except, she doesn’t act like it’s a survival skill. When she gets burned, she’s depressed, not afraid or panicked. Someone who uses beauty as an weapon or armor exclusively is not going to act like that. They may feel uncertain and listless if they don’t know how to approach problems without using their beauty against the other person, but that’s assuming that we’re back on Earth, not on an alien world where she was basically told again and again that if she couldn’t be his beautiful, perfect arm candy, she was useless. Basically, beauty=alive. Ugly=dead.
So why isn’t she afraid when she gets burned? Why isn’t she panicking when she can’t get back to her old normal? And why is it that when she falls back on her old ways from before arriving on Icehome, in her head it feels more like a reflex, like she’s being lazy in falling back on old ways rather than trying to actually adapt to her new environment. There’s absolutely no inkling of trauma in her thinking, just constantly referring back to what her former own liked or expected when approached with any sort of problem. She’s acting like a child rather than an adult, which kind of kills her redemption arc.
That being said, I liked how she acted once they had their split and how she treats him when he doesn’t seem to realize she’s changed. That is when I feel she’s been redeemed. I don’t care if she was conceited or lazy before. That’s fine. It annoys me that the author tried to justify it as something other than a person not bothering to adapt to a change in circumstances. She had reasons, and that’s fine, but own it.
