In a perpetually foggy northern American town, a school is plagued by a mysterious illness that sees its teenage girls fall down, froth at the mouth, and undergo convulsions and seizures. It would sound like your standard YA horror lite, or like someone should be accusing Goody Proctor of speaking with the devil, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s based on actual events that took place in a town in New York state only a year or two ago. (I’m also not sure whether it’s supposed to be YA or not; if so, it’s a bit more nuanced than I recall my teen novels being.) Continue reading The Fever
Both: male and female; dead and alive; watched and watcher. This is a gentle, lyrical novel featuring two central characters, a Renaissance painter and a grief-stricken English teenager. They occupy their own narrative strands, which, though separate, are interconnected, and which can be read in an order chosen by the reader (I lack imagination, so I just started at the beginning).
Continue reading How to be Both
In rainy County Clare, a teenage girl with a life-threatening illness lies in her attic bedroom, surrounded by nearly four thousand books, and tells the story of her family.
Continue reading History of the Rain
This is an unsettling little book that resists categorization. I guess…coming-of-age suspense novel with witchy undertones? The protagonist, Merricat, lives in her family’s ancestral home with her sister and her uncle. It’s clear that someone in the family is a murderer, but no one in the family seems uneasy about that prospect. Things come to a head when an external force comes into the house. It’s kind of like that other castle novel, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, except that as well as delightful, it’s also kind of creepy.
Fun fact: when Shirley Jackson’s first story, The Lottery, appeared in the New Yorker in 1948, she received so much hate mail in response that the local postmaster stopped speaking to her; thus possibly proving that Twitter didn’t create jerks, just enable them.
