Rose Mellie Rose

As much as that whole "thanks for raping me" thing creeped me out as well, I'll go off in another direction. The sentence structure of this book is definitely particular, as much as one can tell from a translation. I studied French in high school and have to read a lot of translated works this semester (from Ancient Greek, though, not French), so I latched onto the language of the main character and tried to analyze it. We don't know where this story takes place, but it's most likely some island off the coast of backcountry 1980s France. The "continent" they speak of is most likely Europe, and the alphabets must be different versions of French. The language in the story has a naive quality that comes across very well even through the language barrier, probably because it's so purposefully simple and straightforward. Mellie seems to have almost no personality of her own, since her narration comes across as purely objective notes about the experiences she has never had until this point in her life. French is a pretty indirect language, so letting this character speak in first person and pulling it off is a testament to Redonnet and Stump both.