Johah wrote about the twists and the jars (and bees, a bit). I’d like to expand on his post.

I read the “leftwrist twist” as a bracelet rather than a watch (although with how vaguely they’re described, I could see the phrase referencing a watch, a ring, a bracer, whatever). I never considered the twists to be an indicator of time, rather (after Maddie pointed this out to me in a chat we had), an indicator of each character’s respect for the other. One of the data visualizations that the class examined on Thursday took up quite a lot of space to say that as time progresses, each narrative becomes more and more focused on the other character – Hailey for Sam, Sam for Hailey – instead of the protagonist from whose perspective the story is told. This transition is reflected in the narrative by the way each character describes the other’s, and their own, “leftwrist twist”: their own starts off valuable and becomes less so (H90, “my Diamondy Leftwrist twist” becomes “Leftwrist twist of Scat”, H309), and the other’s starts off cheap and becomes even more valuable than the narrator’s own had ever been (“Hailey’s Leftwrist Bronze Twist”, S90 turns to “Leftwrist Twist of Forever”, S309). As we’ve come to expect, the lines’ placements counter each other.

On to the jars. The jars of honey aren’t quite as interesting as the twists, but I did find something rather neat: every line from the main text that contains the word “jar” is almost exactly the same in both narratives, except for minor differences in terminology. “HONEY”, mentioned slightly more often, actually tends to differ more.

And another note on pollen — I wonder where Hailey got her honey? She’s allergic to bee pollen. I guess there’s a case there for this entire story being a coma dream, which would explain quite a few of the time-based inconsistencies. Metals changing, less than 10 jars of honey _bee_ing enough to maintain two characters over the course of a hard-to-describe amount of time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this book hides time shenanigans.

The ever-relevant XKCD here isn’t quite as sappy as Only Revolutions, but with all the inconsistencies that keep popping up, I’m surprised that no scientific explanations like this have been presented to explain the book’s events.