Epithet Erased Prison Of Plastic is such a great book. It hands you a teenage girl who is unrelentingly snarky and childish, who just wants to play pretend instead of doing her chores or being responsible. If you try to call her out on this, she’ll stomp her feet and roll her eyes, and completely ignore you. She’s the classic archetypal mean girl and you want her to implode for being catty and vindictive to a bunch of twelve year olds.
And then the book grips you by the collar of your shirt, stares you in the eye, and reveals that Lorelai is like this because she cannot face reality. Because if she tries to actually sit with her thoughts and the people in her life, she will be forced to confront the fact that the conduit for their current misery is in part, her. And even if she’s wrong, she still has to live in a house with an absentee father who wouldn’t care if she vanished and a little sister who she has pushed away chasing her own delusions. Lorelai’s maladaptive daydreaming is destroying her real life, until the fake life is all she has left. And then two paragraphs later a wizard and a gargoyle help explode a dragon made of s’mores.











