A wonderfully weird novel about powerful women, inheritance, and desire.
Fowler Island seems like a quaint getaway off the coast of Ohio in Lake Erie, but something sinister lurks beneath its surface—literally.
Henrietta Volt, 24, hasn’t been back to her childhood home in a decade when Beatrice Bethany, her older half sister, calls in the year 2000 with the news that their father, James, has died and she must return to the island for the funeral. Henrie loved growing up as an island kid alongside B.B., but her memories are fuzzy, especially the circumstances under which she left at age 14 with her mother, Carrie, while B.B. stayed behind with their father. When Henrie and Carrie return for the funeral, their memories, and a whole lot more, take shape, revealing secrets that go back generations. This book has all the elements you could want in a thriller—missing women, a mysterious mansion, monsters, ghosts, and, at its center, a pair of sisters as unsettling as the Blackwoods of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Moulton juggles these pieces well as she moves the story between 2000 and 1989, when the sisters were teenagers. She delivers many delicious moments of suspense and sheer terror. The scope is so ambitious, though, that the story can feel convoluted in some places, while it's oddly thin in others. The island, including the family house and the quarry where some pivotal action takes place, is described in minute detail many times over, while certain subplots remain unexplored. Some aspects of the Fowler and Volt family mythology are revisited to the point of redundancy, while others go unaddressed. Moulton builds a fascinating world but never quite establishes its rules. Still, each point-of-view character who narrates the story—Henrie, B.B., Carrie, and Sonia, the island archivist and a family friend of sorts—pulls off her piece to tell an engrossing tale.
A wonderfully weird novel about powerful women, inheritance, and desire.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-53832-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.
A disturbing household secret has far-reaching consequences in this dark, unusual ghost story.
Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab and recovering from a recent tragedy, has taken a job as a nanny for an affluent couple living in the upscale suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey, when a series of strange events start to make her (and her employers) question her own sanity. Teddy, the precocious and shy 5-year-old boy she's charged with watching, seems to be haunted by a ghost who channels his body to draw pictures that are far too complex and well formed for such a young child. At first, these drawings are rather typical: rabbits, hot air balloons, trees. But then the illustrations take a dark turn, showcasing the details of a gruesome murder; the inclusion of the drawings, which start out as stick figures and grow increasingly more disturbing and sophisticated, brings the reader right into the story. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory must solve the mystery of the house's grizzly past before it's too late. Rekulak does a great job with character development: Mallory, who narrates in the first person, has an engaging voice; the Maxwells' slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child.
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-81934-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A new and contemplative take on the vampire novel.
Following a vampire across more than 200 years, this novel considers “whether this world and life in it is a kindness or an unkindness, a blessing or a curse.”
At the age of 10, Anna faces illness and death daily as an epidemic sweeps through her town. After the deaths of her father and brother, and when she's at her sickest, her grandfather arrives. Just as she’s about to succumb to the illness that killed her whole family, he transforms her into a vampire like himself. When she asks him why he did it, he replies: “This world, my dear child, all of it, right to the very end if there is to be an end, is a gift. But it’s a gift few are strong enough to receive. I made a judgment that you might be among those strong few, that you might be better served on this side of things than the other. I thought you might find some use for the world, and it for you.” The years that follow are difficult and often wrought with loss for Anna. She lives many lives over the centuries and eventually takes on the name Collette LaSange, opening a French preschool in Millstream Hollow, New York. Chapters alternate between Anna’s life beginning in the 1830s and her current life in 1984 as Collette. Notable points of tension arise when Collette tries unsuccessfully to sate her hunger, which is becoming increasingly unbearable, and as her interest in the artistic growth of a student named Leo deepens. Through decadently vivid prose—which could have been streamlined at times—this hefty novel meditates on major themes such as life, love, and death with exceptional acumen. The final questions in the book—“How presumptuous is the gift of life? What arrogance is implicit in the act of love that calls another into existence?”—serve as an anchor to meditations on these themes found throughout.
A new and contemplative take on the vampire novel.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781250856760
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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