We're getting two chapters in one day because the last chapter was so damn pointless.

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Okay. Whew! The story’s back on track. No more interviews or BBC montages to fill in exposition. Here’s a tip for anyone who decides to write a story with a first person narrative: the entire story happens from the perspective of the narrating character. This means that there’s no room for exposition to fill in any blanks that the character might not know about. Theresa even says at the beginning of the story that she doesn’t know how some things happened because she wasn’t there, even though

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We get a bunch of meaningless information about the room where Theresa is interviewed and the people in it with a whole bunch of numbers. You might be thinking that I’m fixating on those numbers. That’s because there are more of them in the narration than actual page numbers!! Blair’s in the bathroom at the moment, which Theresa sees as a moment to ‘shine on her own.’ She clearly did none of this when she was a star pitcher, model student, and was basically better than her sister. Where the

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After watching her BBC montage, Theresa wonders if anything can go right in this world (while we wonder if anything can go right in this story). Apparently she has a ‘trademarked’ funny face, because her shopping assistant, Nancy, begins to laugh at how an eighteen year old with no experience in anything is supposed to take on such big responsibility. 

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The excitement of the nuke is behind us now, so let's see what happens in the aftermath.

With absolutely no lead in, Theresa wakes up in a hospital with Prime Minister Peter Blair standing next to her bed. She correctly guesses that the secret of HAL is out.

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This is the one, people! The author has promised that this is the chapter where it hits the fan and something finally happens!

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Instead of anything interesting, we are dragged through Theresa’s time at college. Boston College, to be exact. This is in alignment with the author’s Christian beliefs, Boston College being a Jesuit institution. We are then treated to a whole page’s worth of infodump about BC which Boutin seems to have gleaned from the introductory paragraph on the college’s wikipedia page. There is no reason for us to know any of this, unless the story concerns exactly the number of how many undergrads there

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Normally where a new chapter begins, there is a page break. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means that the text stops wherever an idea ends on a page, and then everything starts from the top of the next page. Not so here, as ‘Chapter 2’ is smack dab in the middle of page twenty. This is consistent throughout the entire book as far as I’ve read.

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Just a quick explanation of the situation, our intrepid director, Blue EM2, is currently swamped with other projects, so the reins of analyzing the literary travesty known as Empress Theresa have been handed over to me. I know that my analysis style is quite different from our favorite locomotive, but I promise to make it a comprehensive read with updates on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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