Chapter 3: Joanna’s Experiment and the Weight of the Wards

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Joanna attempts her thirty-seventh batch of magical ink using her own blood, herbs, and an egg yolk, hoping to recreate the spells her father protected. The ink remains inert. While she works, a stray cat scratches at her door, offering a fleeting promise of companionship. She reflects on her isolated life in the family’s old Victorian house, the silence since her father Abe died two years ago, and the rift with her sister Esther, who sends postcards but refuses to return. Joanna’s memory of Abe’s death—caused by a “book in progress” that drained him—fuels her obsessive experiments. She descends to the basement library, performs the nightly ward ritual using her mother’s codex, and reaffirms the protective barrier that hides her home. The chapter deepens her loneliness and her unresolved quest for answers about the blood-ink books.

Key Events

Joanna cuts her hand to harvest blood for ink, mixing it with blackened herbs, egg yolk, gum arabic, and honey.
A striped tomcat scratches at the front door; Joanna puts out tuna, but the cat disappears.
She reflects on the empty house, her father’s imagined voice fading, and her fantasy of a companion.
Flashbacks reveal that Joanna broke Abe’s rule: she took three faded books to a conservation lab in Boston, learning that the ink is made of blood and herbs.
She recalls the night she begged Esther to come home after Abe’s death; Esther refused, and Joanna has not contacted her since.
At 7:00 p.m. Joanna goes to the basement, opens the steel door to the library, and recharges the wards using the codex of wards.
While reading the Latin incantation, she feeds the book with her blood; the wards reassert, making the house invisible to anyone not in the warding book.
The chapter reveals that the book that killed Abe is a “book in progress” that he had hidden for decades and tried to destroy for years.

Character Development

Joanna’s character deepens in this chapter through three revelations. First, her grief is still raw: she hears her father’s voice in the faulty linoleum and struggles to imagine his presence. Second, her obsession with recreating the ink shows a determined, almost reckless side—she has tried thirty-seven times, using even menstrual blood, despite knowing the odds. Third, her emotional isolation is clarified. She longs for connection (the cat, the fantasy of a lover), yet she actively avoids reaching out to Esther, nursing a wound of betrayal that stems from Esther’s refusal to return after Abe’s death. Her meticulous ward-setting ritual is both a duty and a coping mechanism, a way to maintain control in a life that feels hollow.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Blood as source and sacrifice: Joanna’s self-inflicted cuts and the ink’s central ingredient underline the physical cost of magic. The book that killed Abe “sucked him dry,” literalizing the theme of blood as both power and danger.
Protection versus knowledge: Abe’s mantra, “It’s not for us to ask how,” contrasts with Joanna’s desperate search for understanding. The codex of wards represents protective silence; the lab reports represent dangerous curiosity.
The cat as symbol of longing: The stray cat scratches at the door, promising warmth and affection, but disappears. It mirrors Joanna’s desire for intimacy that remains just out of reach.
The fridge full of postcards: Esther’s regular postcards are a one-sided lifeline. Joanna reads them repeatedly but will not write back, symbolizing a broken bridge she refuses to rebuild.
The “book in progress” as unresolved trauma: The book that killed Abe cannot be destroyed and resists being read. It physically embodies a spell that is still active, much like the wound of Joanna’s grief.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter reorients the narrative away from Esther’s Antarctic escape and grounds the reader in Joanna’s claustrophobic, routine-bound world. It provides the backstory of Abe’s death and the mysterious book that caused it, planting a crucial plot seed: why was the book in progress? Who wrote it, and why did Abe hide it for so long? It also establishes the ward system as the family’s central defensive magic—one that isolates as much as it protects. Finally, Joanna’s failed ink experiment foreshadows that the blood-and-herb formula alone is not enough; the true secret of the books has not yet been discovered.

Study Questions and Answers

Why does Joanna continue making ink even after thirty-six failures? Joanna is driven by a need to understand how her father was killed. She cannot accept the books’ magic as a given; she wants to replicate it in order to gain agency over the forces that destroyed her family. Her hope and curiosity override her rational expectation of failure.
What does the ward ritual reveal about Joanna’s relationship with her mother, Cecily? Joanna’s mother no longer adds her blood to the wards, so she cannot find the house without being driven in. Joanna has kept her promise to Abe never to fetch Cecily, which deepens the emotional distance between them. The wards physically enforce the family’s fragmentation.
Why is Esther the only person who could find the house without being in the warding book? The text states that “magic had never been able to touch” Esther. Because she is magically null, the wards’ invisibility effect does not work on her. This unique immunity makes her the only bridge between Joanna’s hidden world and the outside—a bridge she refuses to cross.