Goodreads review (short)

I'm not sure exactly what this is, but I like it.

SPOILERS below, obviously!

Quotes (my edition is ISBN 9780141191454):

• "I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us." (p. 41)
• "...and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women." (p.42)
• "...and we would sit warmly together in the kitchen where we were guarded by the house and no one from outside coudl see so much as a light." (p. 50)
• "All cat stories start iwth the statement: 'My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...' (p. 55)
• "On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons." (p. 60)
• "'And he never let our names be mentioned in his house.'
  'Then why do you mention his name in our house?'" (p. 61)
• "'I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.'" (p. 62)
• "...we came downstairs together, carrying our dustcloths and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home." (p. 69)
• "I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes--the left--saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night." (p. 100)
• "...a sudden rushing falling together, as a house, seemingly solid but really made only of ash, might dissolve at a touch." (p. 114)
• "I saw a cup not broken, and picked it up and set it on the table, and then thought to look for more things which might have escaped." (p. 115)
• "We sat quietly in the kitchen, grateful for the chairs and the chicken soup and the sunlight coming through the doorway..." (p. 116)
• "Until now, the roof had always hidden us from the sky, but I did not think that there was any way we could be vulnerable from above, and closed my mind against the thought of silent winged creatures coming out of the trees above to perch on the broken burnt rafters of our house, peering down. I thought it might be wise to barricade the stairs by putting something--a broken chair, perhaps--across." (p. 120)
• "...but when the ground was soft Constance planted a yellow rosebush at Uncle Julian's spot on the lawn, and one night I went down to the creek and buried Uncle Julian's initialled gold pencil by the water, so the creek would always speak his name. Jonas took to going into Uncle Julian's room, where he had never gone before, but I did not go inside." (p. 137)
• "'Poor strangers,' I said. 'They have so much to be afraid of.'"

Notes I wrote/other thoughts:

• "Hoarding what they don't need until it turns into poison." (re: p. 42, where we learn about the jars of preserves that will kill you if you eat them.)
• "Echoes what Merricat did to Charles: 'changing' their house and trying to eradicate them so they'd have to leave. Failed, clearly." (re: p. 116, which describes the near-complete destruction of the Blackwood house. (It occurred to me later that if you look at this book from a magical perspective, maybe the sacrifice of the home was necessary to remove Charles from the house and break the spell he'd cast over Constance. That would be one explanation for why they're so cheerful at the end.)
• 260116: Another thought I just had is that power is diluted when spread through too many objects (or people). The fewer things you have, the more imoportant (and powerful) those things are. So as long as the Blackwood sisters were burdened by this huge mass of stuff their family had collected, they were vulnerable: each breakable possession was a vulnerability. (Think of Koschei the Deathless having ONE vulnerability and hiding it in multiple-multiple layers of security.) Maybe this was also how Charles got in: Merricat buried TOO MANY things, and so her power was dispersed and weakened until one of her protections broke. She essentially (though probably unintentionally) had to concentrate her power again by burning down the house and most of her things. (See also Constance's terror over the idea of breaking one of their remaining cups; see also the hidden treasure in the basement, unfound and undamaged; see also the sisters' ONE remaining "vulnerability" at the end (Constance's fear of spiders) and how easy it is to guard against.)
  On a much darker note, this could also explain the legend the sisters have built by the end: by killing off their family members (and eventually poor Uncle Julian) and driving away Charles, they have focused all of the Blackwoods' power into the two of them, two poles of the same star.