In this clearly Gothic novel-inspired contemporary romance, unemployed and down on her luck Annie Hewitt has to spend the next sixty days in a small cottage on a remote island on the coast of Maine, because of complicated arrangement in her recently deceased mother’s will. Her closest neighbour just so happens to be Theo Harp, famous horror writer and her stepbrother for a time when they were teens. As a teenager, Annie had a big crush on Theo, but he was unpredictable and at turns […]
To sleep, perchance to dream
Night Beach (4.5 stars) is about a one very simple thing. A girl surfer-slash-artist has a crush on a boy surfer who sees her — sometimes. But it’s also about a few other very complicated, possibly unreal things, which make this book overall very hard to define. Abbie likes Kane; this much is clear. In fact, she’s obsessed with him, in that painfully teenage way that grovels for the tiniest morsel of acknowledgement and acceptance. This kid, Kane, is a few years older, stays in […]
Women Can Be Scary Part 3: Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is a classic that has been characterized as a romance and some sort of gothic chick lit. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebecca is a dark and suspenseful novel, reminiscent of Jane Eyre, with an ending that involves violence and is far from happy. Like Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the reader might find him/herself rooting for a murderer and feeling distinctly uncomfortable about that. Rebecca is set in the 1930s mostly at a seaside […]
Sisters, Old English Manors, Shell Shock, and Slow-Moving Disappointment
I probably should have written my review of this book closer to finishing it, because as of right now, my reaction is pretty much just: Meh. The House at Riverton is a post-WWI gothic type novel that chronicles the life of the Hartford family through the eyes of young Grace Bradley, a servant at Riverton Manor from the age of fifteen. Grace is now ninety-nine years old and recounting the story of her time with the Hartfords (particularly with the two sisters, Hannah and Emmeline) […]
“We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.”
Goodreads overview: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeched, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten… her suite of rooms never touched, […]
Ghost story? Metaphors? Say what now?
Oy. First thing: the third star of this rating is entirely for Jack Davenport, the narrator of the audiobook, whose voice is like sex. When he talks, my ovaries try to leap out of my body like that tiny alien in Alien. I try to explain to them this is counterproductive, but it continues to happen. Second, this book was incredibly frustrating and I hope writing this review will help me to sort out why. I read Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, several years ago, and […]