This is the second novel by Simone St James I’ve listened to, and both were gripping. A little bit of a slow start, but they pick up and just race to the finish. I picked a good one to start my Cannonball Read adventure! We start with Kitty Weekes, a poor London girl on the run, pretending to be a nurse at a psychiatric facility for Shell Shock patients returned to Britain after the first World War. But of course, not everything is as it seems […]
I keep wanting to love Kate Morton’s books, and it keeps not happening.
I was ready to love this book from the moment I heard about it. The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books, and stories about family secrets and hidden rooms and stuff like that are like catnip to me. And the bare bones of this story is indeed pretty satisfying. Unfortunately, the execution of it ruined most of my enjoyment, and I decided halfway through that I wasn’t going to read any more of this author’s books. I’ve been really excited about two of […]
Persevere beyond the first third of the book, it gets better
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) […]