The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill (164 pages)
Published by Vintage
Bookish rating: 4

I managed to squeeze in one more spooky book before Halloween. The Woman in Black is a the best, most classic type of gothic chiller. The creepiness occurs less in what we see and more in what we don't. Like our narrator, Hill lets our imagination get the best of us--in a very good way.

Arthur Kipps must tend to the estate of an old (now dead) woman who lives way past civilization in a mansion on some goopy marshes. Hauntings begin, of course. Sounds, sightings, general dread and creepiness.

During the book's climax, I was reading while feeding Lorelei in a dimly lit room, as wind and rain pelted and rattled the windows. It was dark outside. Chris had gone to the store with Charlotte, so we were alone and. . . . I might have had to set the book down once or twice to settle my nerves. That's awesome writing, my friends.

This is the perfect sort of pre-Halloween read to get you in the mood for stormy weather (oh, hello, Hurricane Sandy) and spooky autumn atmosphere. Recommended!

The Leftovers

The Leftovers
By Tom Perrotta (355 pages)
Published by St. Martin's Press
Bookish rating: 4.25

This is my first Tom Perrotta novel, and I'm a fan. The Leftovers sort of satarizes a typical suburban family after a rapture-like event takes over the globe, in which people just vanish. Of course, it's not the real rapture, as a bunch of good Christians are left behind, scratching their heads. Nobody can explain it, oodles of cults pop up, and the world sort of kind of moves on. Or tries to.

So, we meet Kevin, the patriarch of his little family who later becomes mayor of Mapleton; mom-and-wife Laurie, who abandons her family to join a wacky cult; older child Tom, who drops out of college and joins the following of a questionable, self-proclaimed prophet with a penchant for child brides; and Jill, the straight-A student now struggling at school and doing charming things with guys in dorm-drama-like scenarios.

We also meet Kevin's love interest, who lost her entire family in the non-rapture. She's by far the msot interesting and heartbreaking character.

Perrotta has an amazing ability to sum up the complex, layered, and often ridiculous nuances of suburban family life--such as the mom who views each task in her day as grains of sand, taking up time, rushing her to uncomfortable efficiency, whether she's vacuuming or having sex, or a 4-year-old's insistence on drinking apple juice in a cup without a lid, letting her, and then going nutso with a touch of profanity when she inevitably spills it--and nobody makes a move to clean it up, assuming Mommy will do it. At the same time, the novel is most definitely comic, poking fun at suburbia with such tiny details as a mom exaggeratedly waving her hand in front of her face near a smoker.

This tension between satire and heart creates a fascinating result: a novel simultaneously deeply amusing, insightful, and utterly heartbreaking. I don't quite know how Perrotta did it--the writing is unlike anything I've come across in a long, long time---perhaps ever.

Highly recommended.

The Hangman's Daughter

The Hangman's Daughter
By Oliver Potzsch (448 pages)
Published by AmazonCrossing
Bookish rating: 3.25

I read this book for two reasons. First, the premise seemed interesting: a series of murders in a small, 17th-century German village lead to accusations of witchcraft. Second, this was a wildly successful translation (from German) that Amazon's international publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, bought and published. Since much of what Amazon publishes is cheaply (or freely) acquired, I was super interested to gauge the quality of  a bestseller.

Meh. The plot is good enough and the idea of humanizing and going into the head of a hangman is an interesting approach. Potzsch gives a good flavor of the town and its politics, and overall the novel isn't bad. However, the writing is bland and often cliched, which could be partially due to the translation. Hard to say, since I didn't read the original German version. Plus, you know, I can't read German. An excessive! use! of! exclamation! points! often makes the novel seem overdone, with a Batman-like (wham! bang!) cheese factor, especially with dialogue.

Some scenes are genuinely scary, such as when the so-called "devil" sneaks into a sick child's room to kill her (she escapes), and the "witch" torture scenes are blessedly not needlessly gratuitous--torture for the sake of drama and gore instead of plot movement is one of my pet peeves. Potzsch balances this very well, considering the village hangman (who's in charge of getting confessions via torture) is the main character and accusations of witchcraft abound.

In short, the novel is okay. Not bad, not great. I doubt I'll read the sequel.

Book of Shadows

Book of Shadows
By Alexandra Sokoloff (320 pages)
Published by St. Martin's Press
Bookish rating: 3.75

Well, it's October and that means it's time for spooky, scary stories, no?

I discovered Sokoloff's thriller and somewhat demonic writing while at a huge publishing expo I attended for work. In the exhibition hall, publishers literally hand you books (ahead of print). I was wandering along and a marketing guy literally pulled me aside and said I looked like their demographic (I was youthfully in my mid-20s at the time) and said I should read this spiffy new book, The Harrowing. The author, Sokoloff, was there and she signed the book for me. I was too shy to explain that thrillers ain't really my thing, so I left with the signed book and it sat on my shelf for a year or two.

For whatever autumnal reason, I got in the mood for something dark, picked the book and loved it. It was bubble gum entertainment, but well done spooky bubble gum entertainment. A win.

So, I picked up my second Sokoloff novel, Book of Shadows. In Boston, a wealthy college girl is murdered in what seems like a satanic ritual. Ruh-roh. We get the story from the point of view of one of the embittered detectives, which works fine. The plotting and pacing are very good and the writing is tight and not cheesy. (I hate cheesiness when it comes to whodunnits or thrillers or investigative whatever--I can't even be in the same room as an NCIS episode because I roll my eyes and editorialize too much, driving Chris batty).

The book is dark, gruesome, genuinely scary, and engrossing. Everything you'd want from a mid-October read.

The Sweet Far Thing

The Sweet Far Thing
By Libba Bray (819 pages)
Published by Delacorte Press
Bookish rating: 4

So, remember in my previous post on Rebel Angels, I made a fuss of extending (good) trilogies out, so I can draw out my bookish pleasure? Well, I just didn't make it this time. After Rebel Angels, the second book of the Gemma Doyle trilogy, I simply missed the Gemma Doyle world. The library had an e-copy available of The Sweet Far Thing, the third and final book, and after debating whether I could read 819 pages before it was due back, I downloaded it to my Kindle.

Done in 8 days. Granted, I've been on maternity leave since yesterday--without a baby to show for it--so I've had an unexpected and delightful amount of time to read in the past 36 hours. Time I shall soon long to have back, methinks.

I very much enjoyed this third book, but of the entire trilogy, this one was probably my least favorite. The plot gets a tad confusing, as Gemma must determine what to do with the power of the realms. Like the Harry Potter books, the fantasy element of the Gemma Doyle novels is deeply symbolic, almost religiously so. However, aspects of the realms got confusing and I didn't fully understand the mechanism that required this sacrifice or that one.

But really, no matter. Gemma Doyle is no Harry Potter, but oh, she is a girl! My very favorite thing about Libba Bray's three novels is how incredibly girly they are, but in a way that pushes them to be bold, powerful, brave, and smart, without being annoyingly obvious about it. She continually uses the corset as a metaphor--in an effing brilliant way, such as: "Should. That word, so like a corset, meant to bend us to the proper shape" (p. 562). Or, when observing her classmates preparing for their debuts to society and a cloistered life of weak tea and good behavior, Gemma describes the whole "coming out" process as "squeez[ing] their minds into corsets, lest some errant thought should escape and ruin the smooth illusion they hold of themselves and the world as they like it" (p. 784). Oh, Gemma loves herself a gaudy pink dress with beads and diamonds, but that doesn't mean she wants to be married off to the highest bidder and fill the rest of her days carefully grooming her social status and reputation via balls, teas, and so on.

Bray so obviously LOVES girls, and all three books really celebrate them, in myriad ways, without being cutesy or shallow. At the end of this final novel, Gemma overhears her straightlaced old headmistress generating a laugh that can only be described as a giggle. She says, "It is a giggle full of high spirits and merry mischief, proof that we never lose our girlish selves, no matter what sort of women we become" (p. 813).

I just love that.