The Lantern, by Deborah Lawrenson

So, in case you haven't been paying any attention to the blog lately, I just finished up a read-along of The Lantern (first week here). If you want my as-they-happened, totally-spoilerful thoughts, you should go check those posts out. If you don't, or if you want to know how I felt about the book as a whole, read on!

The Lantern is not really a story I'd have picked up on my own. It's one of them gothic novels, except set in the present-ish day, and I have not always been a fan of the melodrama and the sekrits and the falling-apart houses. But I think I've read enough of this type of novel to at least sort of know what to expect, and that certainly helps. But but, I have not read Rebecca, which is apparently the basis for this book. Sooooo I may be missing a lot of stuff here.

But but BUT, I still managed to really like this book. It has two narrators, which I love, and goes back and forth in time, which I love, and starts at the end, which I love, and has an entirely unreliable narrator, which I love. It's also got a sensory theme to it, which I am starting to like, and lots of spookyness, which I appreciate. Not terrible, right?

And the stories proper are quite interesting, too. The primary narrator, who is nameless but sort of goes by Eve, meets a guy and sets off on a romantically romantic adventure, moving to the French boonies and fixing up an old falling-apart house, and it's all delightful except that he won't talk about his ex-wife, like, at all. Not a whit. And Eve thinks that's all suspicious and stuff, and so does one of her new neighbors who has at one point met said ex-wife and... misses her? I guess, and then some even more suspicious stuff happens and Eve is like, oh boy. The other narrator, Bénédicte, is from the past and lived in the falling-apart house before it started falling apart. And her brother is insane and her sister is blind and her parents are not terribly good parents and Bénédicte does her best to take care of everyone but you know from early on that they're all haunting her in her old age and she's sure she deserves it.

Quite good, and as of the end of the fourth of five parts, I was like, greatest book ever? It was wonderfully compelling and spooky and interesting and things were quite exciting. But then things kind of derail as the slow build of the book turns into a lot of exposition and explanation, and I think if I had been prepared for this I might not have been so irked by it, so I am telling you now! And certainly with the book a few days in my past now, I'm feeling much better about the ending, but oh my goodness while it was happening... whatever! Moving on!

So I can't give it my endorsement of absolute awesomeness, but I can definitely say that it's worth a read, especially if you can talk about it with others who will pick up on all the things you didn't, like those darn Rebecca parallels. And it is totally perfect for a cool fall evening and a cup of hot cocoa. Mmm, hot cocoa. If you need an excuse to drink some, this is a good one!

Recommendation: For lovers of the Gothic, the spooky, ghosties, and hot cocoa.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

I have never been a Henry James fan. I quickly learned to Cliffs-notes the heck out of any James I ever had to read for school rather than read any more page-long sentences than absolutely necessary. The man loves his commas. But for whatever reason (shortness, probably!), I decided to actually read this novella when it was on my freshman comp syllabus, and I remember quite enjoying it! So I figured, when I found it on audio, that it would be a delightfully spooky start to this year's RIP Challenge.

Well. Eh. I mean, yes, compared to all other Henry James I've "read," this was fantastic. But I think that memory of awesomeness set the bar a liiiiiittle high on this listen!

The story is structurally excellent. It starts with a group of people sitting around some old inn or other chatting about spooky things, and this mysterious guy is like, "Dudes, I have the spookiest story." And everyone else is like, "Do tell." And MG is like, "Well, I mean, I don't want to paraphrase, so let me send away for someone to mail me the well-worn manuscript I keep locked away in my house, it'll be here in a couple days." And everyone else is like, "'Kay."

And so the manuscript gets there, and then we're in the story proper, which is of a governess who goes off to the country to take care of a couple kids, one of whom has recently been expelled from school for some unknown reason. While she's there, she sees a creepy dude and then later a creepy lady, and she quickly ascertains/decides that these are the ghosts of some dead former employees of the estate. She also ascertains/decides that the kiddos can see these ghosts, too, and that a) the kids are keeping the ghosts a secret and b) the ghosts are influencing the kids in some creepy way. There's a lot of skulking about and people appearing and disappearing and, spoiler?, that line between ascertaining and deciding becomes important in the end.

It's a creepy little story on paper, but this audio version suffers from the same problem I had with The Eyre Affair — namely that the narrator seems to be more "reading words off a page" than "telling a ghost story." I wanted and expected hushed voices and proper ghost story pacing, and I did not get those things.

And those things would have helped a lot with the things I had forgotten about the novella, which is that it is slow as all get out at the beginning, and then ends very abruptly, and the motivations of the characters are confusing or nonexistent. As a ghost story of indeterminate origin and unreliable narrator, I can forgive these problems, but if I have to listen to it as a strict retelling of some old manuscript, I'm gonna get a little antsy about them.

I think next time I find myself remembering this story fondly, I'll grab a print copy and read it at two in the morning during a thunderstorm. Can't get better ambiance than that!

Recommendation: I can't recommend the audiobook, but I think the story is good for someone who wants a bit of a literary ghost story.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge)

Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill

An interesting thing about listening to audiobooks at work is how the variously imposed stopping points affect my feelings about the book. For example, with The Amulet of Samarkand a little bit ago, I found myself really super duper excited to hear the end of it because my iPod died in the middle of a climactic scene. In other books, quitting time has come in the middle of some less exciting story bits and so I'm simply content to wait until the next day to find out what happens.

With this book, I encountered a new situation — a book that is completely different between Day 1 and Day 2 of listening to it. Seriously, after Day 1 I came home to Scott raving about how delightfully creepy everything was, with this ghost just sitting in a chair looking out a window or with the narrator always quietly suggesting a hint of bad things to come. See, in the first half of the book we meet a Rock Star with goth-y tastes who hears about some chick auctioning a ghost on the internets and is all, "Buy it Now!" So the ghost gets bought, in the form of a potentially haunted suit which arrives in the titular box, and Rock Star is all, "That's cool, I guess." Until, of course, it turns out that there's an actual ghost involved. And then when it turns out that the ghost was purposely and maliciously sent to Rock Star, things get even more creepy. And that narrator seriously had the campfire ghost story voice down. I was spooked.

But then on Day 2, it seems we don't really care about the quietly spooky aspect of the story and now we're more interested in the loud, "I'ma GET YOU, Rock Star!" aspect instead. And it's not quite as interesting, possibly largely because Hill throws in a few "unexpected" plot twists and then says, "Hey, did you get that? Let me say it another way, just in case." There's still a lot of decently creepy stuff, and I will never look at a Denny's the same way again, but there is a lot more focus on Hill's message.

And I really think I would have enjoyed this book more had I read or listened to it all in one go, or maybe in thirds, so that the division between Creepy Ghost Story and Journey to Find Oneself were less stark.

As it stands, I'm a big fan of Day 1 and would go listen to it again. I'm not sure how it comes across in print, but if it's anywhere near as chilling, I will recommend this book based on that alone.

Recommendation: For fans of Stephen King-like suspense/horror (which, Hill being King's son, makes sense), or campfire ghost stories, or perilous Journeys to Find Oneself.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger (9 October — 13 October)

I was really super duper excited about this book, and I think that might have been why I didn't like it so much. I will pause here for a collective gasp from the Blogosphere.

Recovered? Good. :)

The plot: Elspeth Noblin (great name, BTW) dies and leaves her estate not to her manfriend Robert, but to her twin Edie's daughters who are also twins and who are called Julia and Valentina. Elspeth's will stipulates that the twins must come live in her flat for a year before they can sell it, so they do. And then while they're there they get haunted by Elspeth, who becomes a ghost (which is neat), and the reasons for the twins having never actually met Elspeth are slowly revealed (oooh, family secrets!).

Good things: I love Niffenegger's writing, I just do, and it was all very pretty and fun and descriptive. The fact that we got to learn about Elspeth as a ghost was cool. Playing with a Ouija board is always fun. I loved Martin and I was rooting for him the whole time.

Bad things: I didn't understand why Elspeth left all of her stuff to the twins. She called it "an experiment," but since she didn't seem to know she'd be becoming a ghost, I don't know who was supposed to be monitoring the results. The big family secret is something I figured out in the first few chapters and then had to wait 300 pages to officially find out. And then it was unnecessarily complicated. The whole end-of-book storyline was really weird to me and I didn't understand why any of that had to happen. Does no one in London have any sense? Also, Martin was the only character I really gave a crap about.

So... yes. This is a book that I would like to discuss with people, so if you have any insight, feel free to leave a comment!

And don't think that I hated the book... I liked following along with the twins' lives and I am totally on Team Get Martin Better. But those Bad Things prevented me from loving it.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge, Countdown Challenge: 2009)

See also:
books i done read
Literate Housewife
Devourer of Books
Stainless Steel Droppings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (26 June — 27 June)

This story opens with a rather gruesome scenario — a man called Jack is killing all of the members of a family. But when he gets to the infant son's room, no one is there. The boy, an intrepid explorer, had woken up during the commotion, gotten bored, and simply walked out of the house. He wanders into a graveyard with Jack following, but with some help from the ghosts inhabiting the graveyard, the boy is kept safe. He is raised by the Owenses and given the name of Nobody, because that's who he looks like. Nobody but himself. He learns a lot of things from the graveyard and its ghosts, and eventually (of course) ends up fighting the man Jack and his cronies.

The Graveyard Book was a cute little book (that gave me more sunburn!), but I didn't like it as much as I guess I thought I would. A lot of things just sort of happen without much explanation, starting from the very beginning. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had I known who Jack was and why he wanted to kill Bod from the start; as it was it seemed more like an afterthought. I did like the very realistic Scarlett Amber Perkins, especially at the end, but I didn't understand why she or her mother was okay with Scarlett hanging out with Mr. Frost. Things like that. Ah, well.

Rating: 7/10

Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher (16 November)

Man, what a crappy weekend for reading. I mean, it was a good one in that I read about 700 pages and finished two books this weekend, but I was really disappointed by those books.

This one especially! Grave Peril is the third in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, and I very much enjoyed the first two books. Sadly, this one just did not work for me.

The plot here is that Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire, gets drawn into a case where ghosts are attacking people, someone is probably attacking the ghosts, and there's a demon that attacks people in their nightmares. Not a bad premise.

But! There are about eleventy bajillion red herrings in the book that don't all sort themselves out in the end, there's at least one continuity error, and in the end everything is solved by love or something stupid like that. Butcher is an engaging writer, for sure, and I definitely wanted to know what happened in the end, but then it was stupid and I was sad. It's sort of like when VeggieTales is on TV and you know that there's going to be a corny tie-in to God at the end of the episode, but those vegetables are just so darn cute that you keep watching it anyway.

I'll probably pick up the next book in the series in the hopes that it will get better, but if it doesn't I guess I'm done. Sigh.

Rating: 6/10

Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle (3 September − 8 September)

My first book for the RIP Challenge, and a great one, at that!

Tamsin is the story of a girl called Jenny (not Jennifer) Gluckstein, who is forced to move from New York City to a farm in Dorset, England, when her mother marries an English bloke. She thinks it's going to be really boring, but it gets pretty exciting when she discovers boggarts, ghost cats, and the titular spirit. Jenny befriends Tamsin and works to help her get free from 300 years of wandering around the farm.

The book is written from the point of view of Jenny at 19 looking back on herself at 13, so a lot of the text is riddled with "Meena told me to write this," and "I'll come back and fix that sentence later," and after reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics I was feeling a little overloaded on self-aware novels.

It also takes a little while to get into the real story − there's lots of mostly-unimportant backstory at the beginning about Jenny's home and school life and how much she whined about moving to England − but once Beagle gets to the good part, it's really good. I appreciated that with 30 pages left to go I had no idea how the book was going to end, and the end of the real story didn't disappoint. There's a bit of a where-are-they-now epilogue after that which did, but let's ignore that, shall we?

Rating: 8/10