The Kestrel, by Lloyd Alexander
Apr. 9th, 2009 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaSo here we are on the day designated to discuss The Kestrel. This is the only book that has remained on my favorite books list through all the decades of my life to date, from single digits through what little I've had of thirties. The only book that comes anywhere near it for longevity is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I have loved for longer but not as deeply.
And then when the appointed day comes I am exhausted early and not even sure anybody is still with me beyond Westmark. So I will talk about a few things I thought of, and please jump in to say that you've read it too, and what you think.
One of the first things I noticed on this reread is that Alexander let Westmark take almost all the setup. We have the quick sketch-in of Florian's children, a brief reminder of past events, but for the most part, we already know these people and are going forward with them. Who's new? The Monkey, and Connie, and some of Connie's entourage. And Witz, who is like Connie without his own power.
I remember loving Musket's line on Count Las Bombas's current fortunes: "'If things get worse,' said Musket, 'he might have to make an honest living.'" I remember liking that as a kid. And yet Las Bombas does find himself approximately honest--like many rogues in wartime (especially the fictional kind), he's turned to using his deceptive talents for his country. And the limits of his roguery are clear: he's willing to take money from Mickle as queen of Westmark, but not to do so under any kind of false premise.
The stuff about Stock gets me every time, particularly when Theo says, "He wasn't a great poet. He was a good poet. He might have been better. That's the real loss, don't you see?" and Justin doesn't see, because everything is black and white for Justin. Either Stock was a great poet, in which case his death was a great loss--or he was not a great poet, in which case it was not. And the idea that his death might be a great loss because he was a good friend and a human being, because while he lived he had potential and now he has none, is just incomprehensible. He not only doesn't see what Theo is on about, he is not in a frame of mind that can even really remember that Theo was on about something. Any part of Justin's personal history that doesn't fit into one of the sharply divided categories he's constructed is rewritten--and not even consciously.
This is something I think of as hard to do, possibly because I don't see enough of it in fiction. In my actual life, I have known an unfortunate number of people who simply and conveniently forgot any incident in which they did not come out looking admirable, or which did not fit their preconceptions of the world and its workings. And if it's that common in life, I had sort of been thinking it was hard to do in fiction. Yet here we are watching Justin do it, and I think he's believable doing it, though not admirable, and it's done in remarkably few words. So maybe it's not as hard as I tend to think and people are just unwilling or uninterested in doing it.
I think most of the book is worrying at the philosophical ideas Alexander gives to Jacobus: "The old scholar had written that people were gentle by nature, and Florian asked if Theo believed that. Theo had answered that he did. It was, he told Florian, the way he felt, and he was no different from anyone else. He wondered if he had told the truth then. He was afraid that he had." Theo is finding out that while he has done some noble things, he is not incorruptible by circumstance. The frightening thing for him is not finding out that he is a bad person after all but suspecting that he isn't, that all sorts of people could have been Colonel Kestrel if they'd been pushed and then handed a gun. But they weren't Colonel Kestrel, and he was, and I don't think Theo is allowed to let himself off the hook for that. I don't think he's allowed by the text to say that anyone in his circumstance would have done what he did--merely that many might, or something similar. At the end of Westmark, Theo has to live with an act of nobility and goodness that will come back to haunt him. At the end of The Kestrel the acts that will come back to haunt him are not nearly so pure, not nearly so young.
I loved this book when I was 8. The street grit in his ink. The corpse like a side of beef--I remember the corpse like a side of beef, the mouth full of red mud, those things stuck with me from the time I was 8. And I am immensely grateful that my parents didn't flinch back and say, "Let's get between her and this book; there is time enough for war driving good men mad, time enough for class and politics and moral compromise, when she's into double digits." I am so very glad they didn't patronize me.
The thing that bothered me most this time was at the very end with Torrens: "He had done more than raise troops, provisions, and arms. He had stiffened the spirit of his people, giving them courage even when his own had failed. From the Juliana Palace, he had announced victories in battles that had never been fought, in places that were only names on a map. He had proclaimed stern laws against those who spoke or wrote or published questioning the conduct of the war, and sternly carried them out. He applied justice, recognizing it was injustice. Had he done less, he knew beyond a doubt that, for all her efforts, Augusta would have lost. He had convinced her subjects of certain victory. And so, as far as they were concerned, Westmark had defeated Regia. Torrens had only defeated himself."
The problem I'm having here is that the stuff Torrens did does not seem to be tied to the aristocracy or the monarchy, and the idea that it might have been necessary for victory doesn't seem to be questioned at all. Keller questions it. But when we're given Torrens's certainty, I think we're given too much of the text's certainty with it, and I don't remember what happens with that in The Beggar Queen.
I guess we'll find out next month.
And then when the appointed day comes I am exhausted early and not even sure anybody is still with me beyond Westmark. So I will talk about a few things I thought of, and please jump in to say that you've read it too, and what you think.
One of the first things I noticed on this reread is that Alexander let Westmark take almost all the setup. We have the quick sketch-in of Florian's children, a brief reminder of past events, but for the most part, we already know these people and are going forward with them. Who's new? The Monkey, and Connie, and some of Connie's entourage. And Witz, who is like Connie without his own power.
I remember loving Musket's line on Count Las Bombas's current fortunes: "'If things get worse,' said Musket, 'he might have to make an honest living.'" I remember liking that as a kid. And yet Las Bombas does find himself approximately honest--like many rogues in wartime (especially the fictional kind), he's turned to using his deceptive talents for his country. And the limits of his roguery are clear: he's willing to take money from Mickle as queen of Westmark, but not to do so under any kind of false premise.
The stuff about Stock gets me every time, particularly when Theo says, "He wasn't a great poet. He was a good poet. He might have been better. That's the real loss, don't you see?" and Justin doesn't see, because everything is black and white for Justin. Either Stock was a great poet, in which case his death was a great loss--or he was not a great poet, in which case it was not. And the idea that his death might be a great loss because he was a good friend and a human being, because while he lived he had potential and now he has none, is just incomprehensible. He not only doesn't see what Theo is on about, he is not in a frame of mind that can even really remember that Theo was on about something. Any part of Justin's personal history that doesn't fit into one of the sharply divided categories he's constructed is rewritten--and not even consciously.
This is something I think of as hard to do, possibly because I don't see enough of it in fiction. In my actual life, I have known an unfortunate number of people who simply and conveniently forgot any incident in which they did not come out looking admirable, or which did not fit their preconceptions of the world and its workings. And if it's that common in life, I had sort of been thinking it was hard to do in fiction. Yet here we are watching Justin do it, and I think he's believable doing it, though not admirable, and it's done in remarkably few words. So maybe it's not as hard as I tend to think and people are just unwilling or uninterested in doing it.
I think most of the book is worrying at the philosophical ideas Alexander gives to Jacobus: "The old scholar had written that people were gentle by nature, and Florian asked if Theo believed that. Theo had answered that he did. It was, he told Florian, the way he felt, and he was no different from anyone else. He wondered if he had told the truth then. He was afraid that he had." Theo is finding out that while he has done some noble things, he is not incorruptible by circumstance. The frightening thing for him is not finding out that he is a bad person after all but suspecting that he isn't, that all sorts of people could have been Colonel Kestrel if they'd been pushed and then handed a gun. But they weren't Colonel Kestrel, and he was, and I don't think Theo is allowed to let himself off the hook for that. I don't think he's allowed by the text to say that anyone in his circumstance would have done what he did--merely that many might, or something similar. At the end of Westmark, Theo has to live with an act of nobility and goodness that will come back to haunt him. At the end of The Kestrel the acts that will come back to haunt him are not nearly so pure, not nearly so young.
I loved this book when I was 8. The street grit in his ink. The corpse like a side of beef--I remember the corpse like a side of beef, the mouth full of red mud, those things stuck with me from the time I was 8. And I am immensely grateful that my parents didn't flinch back and say, "Let's get between her and this book; there is time enough for war driving good men mad, time enough for class and politics and moral compromise, when she's into double digits." I am so very glad they didn't patronize me.
The thing that bothered me most this time was at the very end with Torrens: "He had done more than raise troops, provisions, and arms. He had stiffened the spirit of his people, giving them courage even when his own had failed. From the Juliana Palace, he had announced victories in battles that had never been fought, in places that were only names on a map. He had proclaimed stern laws against those who spoke or wrote or published questioning the conduct of the war, and sternly carried them out. He applied justice, recognizing it was injustice. Had he done less, he knew beyond a doubt that, for all her efforts, Augusta would have lost. He had convinced her subjects of certain victory. And so, as far as they were concerned, Westmark had defeated Regia. Torrens had only defeated himself."
The problem I'm having here is that the stuff Torrens did does not seem to be tied to the aristocracy or the monarchy, and the idea that it might have been necessary for victory doesn't seem to be questioned at all. Keller questions it. But when we're given Torrens's certainty, I think we're given too much of the text's certainty with it, and I don't remember what happens with that in The Beggar Queen.
I guess we'll find out next month.
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Date: 2009-04-10 05:06 am (UTC)I keep trying to write intelligent things about these books, and I think I just need to think about them more. They're surprisingly...layered, considering how simple they are on the surface. I'm really glad that I've finally read them.
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Date: 2009-04-10 05:45 am (UTC)Heh, me too on all counts. I don't remember a time when I hadn't read these books; I don't know when I got them or where or why. I know I owned them for years and years and years. (I'm still annoyed at the friend who borrowed them and didn't give them back, and at myself for not remembering which friend so I can badger them about it.) I wonder whether my mother had any idea what was in them.
I haven't reread the Westmark books--I borrowed copies from
And that reminds me of this: When I first started dating
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Date: 2009-04-10 05:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 09:42 am (UTC)The bit of prose that has stayed with me the most clearly is the bit about Theo speaking to someone, and both of them think that they are being reasonable and speaking in a normal tone of voice, when in fact they are screaming at each other. Plus, y'know, Colonel Kestrel. Who of course cannot be found in my work in any way.
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Date: 2009-04-10 11:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 11:32 am (UTC)(And yah. I love that scene with Justin, too. It almost makes my own ears roar while I read it.)
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Date: 2009-04-10 11:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 11:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 09:13 pm (UTC)I'm actually still reading -- got this book later than I meant to -- but I wanted to throw that out sooner rather than later, since I know I was one of the people ragging on Westmark for its thin-ness.
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Date: 2009-04-11 12:30 am (UTC)In my actual life, I have known an unfortunate number of people who simply and conveniently forgot any incident in which they did not come out looking admirable, or which did not fit their preconceptions of the world and its workings. And if it's that common in life, I had sort of been thinking it was hard to do in fiction.
I don't think it's hard to do -- but I do think the audience may have a hard time swallowing it. Because the reader looks at the events as laid out in the book and says, "but that's not what happened," and then wonders how anybody could convince himself otherwise. In a book it looks implausible. Which applies to more situations than just this; I had a long conversation at Potlatch about people doing things so crazy and dumb that if you put them in a book, no one would ever believe it.
I am very glad Cabbarus came back as a problem, because as we said last time -- sure, it's noble to let the guy go, but that doesn't mean he's going to stop being power-hungry and manipulative. I presume he shows up again in the last book? Because this one definitely didn't end that problem.
The Torrens thing bothered me, too, all the more because we have to take the narrative's word for it, that what he did was a) effective and b) necessary. I know that propaganda's an important part of waging war, but the text just tells us flat-out that the country would have fallen apart without his efforts, and I have no real evidence for that. Especially because propaganda does not have to translate to "lies" -- there are ways to use the truth effectively, too.
Three things that nagged at me, in ascending order of size:
1) While I like Sparrow and Weasel a great deal, they seemed just a little bit too naive to me, given the lives they've led. It's kind of the extension of our previous discussion about them not getting diseased: they've not seen violent death first-hand? Really? Living at the raggedy bottom edge of a (decidedly non-idealized) society? It struck me especially when Sparrow insisted the soldiers wouldn't be trying to hurt each other in a war. I had a hard time buying that she would truly be so innocent.
2) Florian's rhetoric misstepped in places, I felt. Specifically, when the invasion starts, and his reaction is "That's between Westmark and Regia." Uh, who does he think Westmark is? I don't think of him as the kind of guy who would believe that fight's going to be conducted entirely between the two aristocracies, so his initial carelessness feels a bit too much like a constructed opportunity for Theo to protag by convincing him.
3) I did have a brief moment of wishing Mickle's part of the story had followed a different line. All the rallying-troops stuff was well-done, but it felt a bit like the book believed what was happening in Marianstat wasn't important. But it really is; in fact, a monarch is generally much more useful coordinating matters from back there than they are on the front lines, especially when they have no military experience. Now, as it fell out, Mickle made the right choice, since without her the Regians would have rolled right over them at the Alma. But it feels a bit like it's setting up a dichotomy, where the royal ministers are inevitably tyrants and the sovereign is inevitably useless (unless she shucks that off in favor of populist action), and I feel like that's cheating a bit on the otherwise excellent points the book discusses.
Though that might translate also to me wishing the book focused as much on Mickle as on Theo, because watching her learn how to deal with politics (warts and all) would interest me as much as watching him learn to deal with war.
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Date: 2009-04-11 04:02 am (UTC)(after the first book I was a bit hesitant to start with this one, sighing: "My kingdom for a child who can read in English, so that I could SEE how a child reacts, what she understands, what she notices!" But "Kestrel" gave much to think about even without having the child to test it on)
Interestingly enough, while the Torres thing bothered me too, was in contradiction with how things were generally done in this book - show rather than tell- my understanding was different from yours. What happened, to my understanding, was that while only the propaganda soul-searching was shown, in fact Torres had kept the kingdom going economically and administratively (as no organization, institution, state is a living organism that just naturally goes on living without the thankless and often unnoticed behind the scenes work). He had been a hero - and no one noticed, as it had not been actual fighting. Only his ethical retreat was noticed, not what he had done, achieved.
As for Sparrow and Weasel, from one side the deprived children I have met in life have had very strange worldview, the mixture of wordiness, innocent cynicism and ignorance. So - if the army would have seen as totally different world, then it might have been kind of understandable that different rules were applied. But - they MUST have met enough soldiers on leave during their life in town at least, right?
Florian's rhetoric was so familiar to me, though - "the proletarians have no fatherland" and the idea of the revolution IS considered above any individual sufferings of people. In fact, in real life many revolutionaries have believed that the worse it gets, the better are the chances for ignition of a revolution.
As for Mickle - it was another case where I felt surprised if not cheated to learn how much she had learned of being a leader, apparently. It makes sense, if we believe that she took becoming a queen seriously, but somehow it had been left behind the scenes.
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Date: 2009-04-11 04:27 am (UTC)But the book also seems entirely aware of the fact that the "bad guys" aren't the only ones doing bad things in war, and that the badness doesn't go away when the good guys do them, so I wouldn't be surprised if the third one goes somewhere with that. (Though it occurs to me now that Mickle's own troops come off as pretty much untarnished -- maybe because, as near as we can tell, they mostly sat around holding Carlsbruch, while Florian and Justin's guys were out doing the dirty work.)
On the topic of the actual government -- in Mickle's position, I wouldn't take Justin as a consul. He can kill things pretty good, and run an irregular military unit, but I don't think that qualifies him for government. Heck, even Torrens reflects at one point that being a physician doesn't exactly prepare him for running a country. But Florian, Theo, and a third guy without any connections to the royal government (but proven administrative capability)
"the proletarians have no fatherland" and the idea of the revolution IS considered above any individual sufferings of people.
That wasn't how I read his statement, though. The full line is: "I don't see that I'm expected to do anything. I'm sorry. It's a bloody piece of business, but it's between Westmark and Regia. I have no part in it. You forget we're a band of desperate outlaws." It sounds more like he's saying the war's irrelevant to what he's doing. And I don't generally read Florian as a guy whose pursuit of his ideals leads him to happily to throw all the actual people involved under a bus, either. He bears the sufferings in mind, even if he doesn't let them deter him.
but somehow it had been left behind the scenes.
Yes, because -- to be fair -- this is not a Theo-and-Mickle series; it's a THEO-and-Mickle series. She's important, but not equally weighted. So things happen offstage. But Alexander obviously recognizes truths like "wars mean crops don't get into the ground and then everybody starves," so I would have enjoyed seeing the story also attend to "there are important things the government can do to keep things going during a war."
Then again, as I said last book -- this is in certain ways the wrong time for me to be reading these. I've been doing too much gritty politics for my own novels, and marveling at how (for example) a dedicated segment of London's government kept the city from utterly falling apart during the Great Plague in 1666. So my brain goes to those kinds of complications, when it probably wouldn't have a few years ago.
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Date: 2009-04-11 04:39 am (UTC)I think what bothered me more about Kestrel than Westmark is the...tone waffling? I am scatterbrained, I am sorry. What I mean is, one the one hand it is an unflinching look at war and brutality and what it does to people and what people do to it. On the other hand, the plot resolution depends on Everybody Kind Of Coincidentally Being In Exactly At The Same Place At The Same Time. Which is not terribly realistic, let alone unflinching. It seemed out of place. Similarly the abruptness of Theo's choices--he acted in similar fashion in Westmark, but he was more pushed around by circumstances there. There might be some deep comment I could make about being at the mercy of internal as well as external currents, that would answer my hrm-ness, but I don't think I can make it right now.
Still a very good book. Just, a waffly good book.
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Date: 2009-04-12 01:17 am (UTC)I loved this book when I was 8. The street grit in his ink. The corpse like a side of beef--I remember the corpse like a side of beef, the mouth full of red mud, those things stuck with me from the time I was 8. And I am immensely grateful that my parents didn't flinch back and say, "Let's get between her and this book; there is time enough for war driving good men mad, time enough for class and politics and moral compromise, when she's into double digits." I am so very glad they didn't patronize me.
I remember reading Johnny Tremain when I was in 3rd grade, and it was considered perfectly age-appropriate. The war in Westmark and Kestrel is more disturbing because it's so much more real. But there is so much depth of emotional reality running through Westmark the disturbing reality of the war just comes with the territory.
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Date: 2009-04-13 12:30 am (UTC)I liked it better than WESTMARK, but am still bothered by the distinctly YA adventure style. I find "adventure" fantasy tiresome unless it involves GRRM-level realism (i.e. POV characters dying), which would be age-inappropriate here. Still, teenage monarchs running off in disguises? A wee bit unrealistic. I liked the lack of a political marriage alliance, but was annoyed that Theo proposed to Mickle off-screen, apparently between books. They didn't seem to be THAT close romantically in WESTMARK. Also, what happened to Monkey? Was he a traitor? Is he dead? If his ambiguous end is a next-book lead-in... I have little tolerance for setup unless it's entertaining at the same time, and I have found Alexander's setup too surface to be entertaining.
On the other hand, I loved the sociological perspective on civil war, and Connie's the first character I heart. It is a compelling read and I will finish out the series.
I think I may be bouncing off Alexander partially because I never read him when I was 8 and more easily fooled. Now that I've been exposed to Deep Adult Fantasy, I am bored by its forerunners and I don't have nostalgia to fall back upon.
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Date: 2009-04-13 01:42 pm (UTC)True, you do not. But some other people who don't have nostalgia to fall back upon have enjoyed reading these as adults, so I think it's less that you are cleverer and more astute than they are than that you are looking for different things in your reading material. Or that they're reading it differently. I don't find the tone of The Kestrel to be adventure at all. There is action. But the way I read it, the tone is distinctly anti-adventure. Theo isn't killed in the raids or the battles--he has to live with surviving and with the things he was willing to do to survive, and that, I think, has a great deal more emotional depth than the death of someone onstage who will be mourned but who will not have to live with their own moral ambiguity in an extremely troubled time.
As I said in the Westmark discussion: I don't find that Deep Adult Fantasy is all that successful at being deep in the first place. If I could think of a dozen political fantasies for adults that did as well with civil war and anti-monarchial revolutions--or with the emotional aftermath of being a violent revolutionary--as these books do, maybe I wouldn't love it as much. (But maybe I still would.)
I agree with you that the monarchs-in-disguises thing is...kind of a bit much. In fact, there's a point in the book I'm revising right now where one of the young nobles wants to go out into the city disguised as a peasant, with her face blacked with soot. The experienced protag has to explain to her that a noble girl with soot on her is not at all the same as a peasant who got dirty in the course of working, and that she wouldn't fool anybody for a second--and that if she and her friends thought she were fooling people when they went slumming when the monarchy was stable, they should ask themselves what, exactly, the barkeeps and tavern owners would have to gain from pointing out that they see through the charade, when they could quietly accept the young nobles' money and go on with their lives instead.
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Date: 2009-04-13 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 01:48 pm (UTC)And yes, watching Mickle learn to deal with politics and have some of the, "Why not? I feel like doing it this way, and the people will like it," stuff not work would have been cool.
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Date: 2009-04-13 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 02:53 pm (UTC)Which, I want to be clear, doesn't make it bad writing as it stands. It just makes it feel, for me, like a different kind of writing than the field campaign parts.
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Date: 2009-04-13 03:06 pm (UTC)I do appreciate the moral development of the characters... but it all feels so heavy. The moral agonizing is spelled out--let's see how terrible the Kestrel is, let's foreshadow Theo's emotional state later on--or maybe it's not spelled out and I'm just reading it as obvious and surface.
With regard to adult political fantasies: I don't really care so much about the anti-monarchial revolution as I do about civil war. Maybe that's the cynic in me mostly bored by democracy in my fiction. Alexander may well be unique in treating the emotional aftermath of a violent revolutionary--but I don't much care about the specific details, and I do know of Deep Adult Fantasy that treats the dark side of revolution, probably with particulars that appeal to me more than Alexander's particulars. (I'm thinking specifically of Kay's TIGANA, but I would also lump books like Sarah Micklem's FIRETHORN into the political/war fantasy category.) For me, it's not so much the details of the politics or the war that attracts me--it's the worldbuilding and the characters. In this case, I find both mildly interesting but not compelling; in both WESTMARK and THE KESTREL, I was compelled to read further by solely plot, and that usually does not bode well for my judgment of a book (incidentally, I had the same problem with Matthew Sturges's MIDWINTER, which is an Adult Adventure Political Fantasy that I couldn't put down but far from loved). I don't define "adventure" so much by tone--Alexander's style is bare enough to preclude any pigeonholing--but by how much I feel plot is the driving focus. Obviously you care more about the characters than me, which will alter your reading.
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Date: 2009-04-13 04:36 pm (UTC)I think that one of the things I like in shorter works, whether they're adult short fiction or children's books, is that plot and character have to be intertwined. When that fails, it fails big--and it sounds like it's at least partly failed for you in this one. But when it succeeds, it goes much better for me than when an author tries to tell me one thing about a character while they're (not deliberately) showing me a completely different person with the character's actions.
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Date: 2009-04-13 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-17 06:08 am (UTC)I will just say, these books are really not like anything else, are they? If I'm wrong, I'd love other examples. The combination of the political viewpoint, the compression, the obliqueness of some of the emotional plot, and the continuing, though more subdued, sly humor makes a completely unique flavor.
P.
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Date: 2009-04-17 01:07 pm (UTC)But yes, they aren't like anything else. When I sat down to write What We Did, I thought, "I'll do something like the Westmark trilogy! But at grown-up length!" But it is not substantially like the Westmark trilogy at all, I don't think, not least because the length is not a minor feature of how the books read. But also because I am not Lloyd Alexander, not even a little bit. And mostly I'm okay with that.
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Date: 2009-05-01 05:38 am (UTC)For my part, I liked The Kestrel OK, but it didn't knock me over. (NB: my reading was unaffected by any experience of having read it as a child, or by having read it at all before for that matter.) I think there was one moment of "compression" that felt particularly unnatural for me: after Stock's death, Theo's transformation from callow youth to guerrilla leader seemed awfully sudden. I may have missed some subtle buildup though.
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Date: 2009-05-01 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-03 09:39 pm (UTC). . .
Date: 2010-02-16 10:47 pm (UTC)And I think 'show don't tell' is way over rated. sorry. I get bored with authors who think they are being subtle and spend three pages describing a character gazing out the window just to get the point across that they live in that house and don't want to.
Re: . . .
Date: 2010-02-17 05:56 pm (UTC)