Blue-Footed Musings

The last few weeks have been miserable. I have not been able to combine words in any way that makes sense to me. Writing about books, which is normally merely a difficult task, has felt almost impossible. Even work has been difficult. I have had to soldier through work, though, and that’s good. Otherwise I would have gotten nothing done there, too. Now I’m going to try soldiering through some blog posts. First, I’ll tackle the non-Dahl books.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Grade: A-

Coraline’s family moves to a house which has an interior door that leads only to a bricked-up wall. Or so it seems, until one day she opens it up and finds another house and another pair of parents, so like her own, on the other side. Interesting and chilling, but it reminded me of Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, which I think I might have liked just a tad better. I have heard such awesome things about Neil Gaiman, I feel like I ought to try all of his books. So far, I have read two (the other being Stardust). Both were good, but neither quite blew me away. I think I will try American Gods next, as one of my former coworkers gave it a rave recommendation.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
Grade: B+

In The Forgotten Garden, a girl is abandoned on a ship when she is very young. A nice family adopts her and she doesn’t remember having been abandoned. But years later, her adoptive father tells her about it and she’s devastated. She becomes obsessed with finding out who she really is, and she passes the obsession along to her granddaughter. The stories of that girl, her mother, and her granddaughter intertwine into one long, convoluted tale involving two old houses, a book of fairy tales, a forgotten garden, and buried secrets.

This is the second Kate Morton book I have read, the first being The Distant Hours, which I liked very much. The Forgotten Garden has a tie-in with one of my favorite books of all time, The Secret Garden, so it seems like I ought to have liked it more than the first. I didn’t.

I have my suspicions about why. One suspicion is that Morton writes the same book over and over, just with slightly different sets of characters and different houses as a settings. It might help explain why so many reviewers claim to love one of her novels while hating the next. Perhaps they see the second one as formulaic. I felt that way, anyway. Another suspicion is that she’s getting better as she goes along. There was more to The Distant Hours than just the story. There were little details and asides that made it special. Those things allowed me to ignore the book’s flaws. I did not notice those same details in The Forgotten Garden, and it didn’t speak to me the same way.

So my working theory is, I guess, that if you’re going to read a Kate Morton novel, pick the most recent. It’s probably the best. And if you choose to go back and read her older work, don’t be surprised if it seems similar.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Grade: A

I really enjoyed The Night Circus. It had an interesting premise (a magical duel set amid a working circus). It was imaginative and well described. It was like a beautiful dream. If the main characters were, as I sometimes felt, a little weakly drawn, it was not enough to jar me from the dream. Thanks to my friend, Sprite, for sending this lovely book my way. I was in need of a good book and it arrived at just the right time!

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton
Grade: A

It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic . . . . I think about it sometimes, that mailbag: of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to their parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark. Waiting, waiting, for someone to realize they were there. For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.

That first paragraph sets the stage nicely for what is to follow in The Distant Hours, a modern Gothic novel. Edie (the main character) is at home when her mother receives one of the long-lost letters. Her mother’s strange reaction to the letter puts Edie on the trail of a mystery that leads her to a decaying castle in Kent and the three old spinsters who live there.

It’s a good thing I bought this book on a whim and did not read the online reviews first. I am quite sure that the negative reviews (of which I later found many) would have turned me off. Usually online reviews work against me by convincing me to buy awful books. It never occurred to me that they could work against me the opposite way! But they certainly did. I postponed reading this book because I thought it was going to be terrible.

It wasn’t even close to terrible. Yes, the book is long (560 pages). Yes, the author does occasionally go into too much detail. Yes, the narrative goes back and forth between times and places and points of view, and some of it is told in the first person and some in the third person. So what? A quick look at the date at the top of each chapter lets you know when the action is taking place, and within a few sentences you know whose point of view you’re reading. It’s not that hard to follow.

In my opinion, Morton handled every element competently. The mystery was interesting, neither so convoluted that you couldn’t guess at the answers nor so obvious that you got bored. The pacing was good. I liked the characters and I was intrigued by their stories. I almost couldn’t put the book down.

In short, The Distant Hours is one of the best new books I’ve read lately.