#Akua is far from the only person in the series to cause mass death of innocent people for her own ends

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

There’s a tension in the later books of Practical Guide to Evil where on the one hand where Catherine attitude towards Akua stems from her own guilt, she tortures Akua as an indirect convoluted form of self-harm and she punishes Akua to punish herself but on the other hand Second Liesse is portrayed as evil sui generis and Akua’s arc is about gradually coming to comprehend the weight of what’s she’s done and grappling with it.

These aren’t inherently contradictory but it’s easy for the narrative to end up at cross purposes by trying to address them both and in practise they’re not successfully reconciled.