Learning more of Roux’s backstory provided much-needed information, but also opened the door to many other questions. Giles may have just wanted to fulfill the role of boyfriend, but he will also have to serve as her captor and interrogator, bearing witness to Roux’s life history. It’s not going to be an easy love story, but it’s certainly going to be an adventure!
Note: This recap may contain spoilers!
We start way back at the point of Roux’s origin in 1816. Well, at least her origin as a vampire. She was a slave on the Remy Plantation down in Louisiana. Her master’s gambling debts cause problems for more than just himself. The bondsmen who come to collect are out for blood — Roux’s, her family’s, her master’s. They are determined to kill them all, and I’m sure they would have completed their mission if not for otherworldly intervention by way of a vampire.
Roux’s rescuer was perhaps a worse option than the bondsmen, considering what he did. She knew her maker, Baldwin, beforehand, but it wasn’t until that moment where he crossed the line and took her into his world. He not only bites her and drags her off to the woods, he throws her in a hole where she remains buried alive for twelve years. Not quite the happy ending that she might have desired, and the rest of her life doesn’t get much better.
Over the next 64 years of check-ins, we find out that she was an outcast of society throughout — a slave that the others could not trust, a leacher of blood from fallen Civil War soldiers, and a social outcast who must wait for society to catch up on acceptance. We get one significant acquaintance detailed from 1920, and it perhaps sheds more light on Roux’s devotion to her friends. That’s the year she was close to a young girl named Ebba, who worked the line at a Pittsburgh cotton factory while Roux cleaned the floors there. And it’s also the year she avenged Ebba’s death by fire by killing her killers. All those loves and losses over the years have weighed heavily on Roux as well. She wears the names of her victims, the ones she regrets, in her skin. The glowing reveal was quite captivating.
Roux is a complex individual, but so is Giles. He shares a little about his own situation; the fact that he’s been reincarnated in his teenage body, his mind much older. And, yet, he’s still younger than her. Their relationship will be not be ordinary, that’s for sure. And Giles does seem determined for them to have that relationship. But there’s still so many secrets to be revealed between them. Can they actually make it through and remain together or will their differences be too much to overcome? We continue to follow along in hopes of getting the answer. Onward to more Young!Giles adventures!
Rating: 3 / 5 Stars
