City of Gods and Monsters

“And while most girls Loren’s age would’ve jumped at the chance to paint the city red, Loren had only wished to curl up on the couch. Couches were safe. Couches were ordinary. Exactly how she preferred everything in her life.”

This description puts Loren in the “not like other girls” archetype, a controversial characterization that critics claim denigrates “most girls” to elevate a heroine, especially one who distances herself from traditional femininity. Loren, who likes clothes and makeup, doesn’t necessarily separate herself from visual markers of womanhood, but rather frames herself as the reluctant heroine who is sucked into adventure through no fault of her own. The repeated syntax of “Couches were…” functions as anaphora that formalizes Loren’s preference for safety and routine, signaling an initial worldview that later collides with the city’s escalating dangers.

“Every instinct screamed at her to turn back—to help her friends, despite that a human could literally do nothing against a warlock and a Darkslayer. She was helpless. Pathetic.”

One of the primary challenges that Loren faces in the novel is the burden of being a human—relatively powerless and with a short lifespan—in a city occupied largely by immortals. Over the course of the novel, she comes to reckon with her relative physical weakness, but how this doesn’t make her “helpless,” particularly after she learns of her supernatural origins. The clipped fragments in this quote work as staccato interiority, registering self-contempt while foreshadowing the later interrogation of what strength means for a mortal in