The Serpent in the Grove - Third 1,000 Words (spoiler warning)

I am continuing to read The Serpent in the Grove. I have now fed its third group of a thousand words to the Oratrice Mecanique d'Analyse Cardinale, and its verdict is 100% AI-generated, with high confidence. 

I finally made it to the infamous sentence, "The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink." The accusation is that the simile is meaningless. Nazir's defense is that the image comes from his childhood, when his mother used to polish the kitchen sink until it reflected the sunrise from a window facing east.

Laura Miller rubbished this simile in Slate. She said it was meaningless to "anyone who didn't grow up with such a sink, mother, or window". It is not obvious from the image itself that the sunrise is being reflected directly from a polished sink. But as someone who has a sink by a window (and I think most people do), I have certainly seen it glow in sunlight.

I have been suspending judgement about this sentence until I read it in its proper context. In the context of the passage in the story, I immediately associated the imagery with the familiar warmth of a domicile. So yes, the girl did smile like sunrise over a sink!

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