The Cloisters

“I didn’t believe her; I didn’t believe anyone who told me there was a magic to it all, a logic, but I forced myself to nod anyway. I had already learned that no one wanted to hear what loss was really like.”

Katy Hays set up Ann Stilwell’s character arc. In Chapter 1, Ann has no place in her worldview for magic and predestiny. By exploring this aspect of her character early on, Hays emphasizes her eventual shift and the tragedy of her choices. Hays uses repetition to underscore Ann’s worldview: “I didn’t believe.”

“Despite the impracticality of it all, the overlooked edges of the Renaissance had grabbed me with their gilt and pageantry, their belief in magic, their performances of power. That my own world lacked those things made it an easy choice.”

This quote reveals Ann’s underlying, subconscious attraction to magic and the unknown. Hays lands on the word “choice,” which underscores two of the novel’s key themes, Fate Versus Free Will and Choice and Personal Responsibility. Later, Ann comes to believe that choice is only an illusion.

“I had never been to Europe, but I imagined it would look something like this: shady and cobbled and Gothic. The kind of place that reminded you how temporary the human body was, but how enduring stone.”

Ann’s observation of the setting heightens the gothic tone of the novel, as well as the atmosphere of otherness—a pocket of crumbling European grandeur in the midst of a modern American city. This moment foreshadows the deaths that occur later, and the way the Cloisters, and Ann by extension, survives.