Book For The Week - 9/11/11

The Thirteenth Tale

by
Diane Setterfield

"From Publishers Weekly

Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures."

I finished listening to the end of this book after I got home from work last night.  It is usually a sign of a good book if I turn my IPod back on to finish listening after my commute ends.  But I am not sure if I would call this a good book or not.  I can say that I really didn't like the first third of the book.   The second third there started to be parts that I liked along with more parts that I did not like.  But the last third was really good.  And I have to admit that the parts at the beginning that I did not like were necessary to the story.  The reason I selected this book to listen to is that it was one that I noticed the library book groups around were reading and discussing last fall.   My own library book group did not select it but it looked like an interesting storyline.   A young bookish type woman receives a letter from a famous authoress asking her to come and write her biography.  The writer is elderly and ill.   A friendship develops between the two women as they collaborate on the book they are writing.   While all that seems like a nice story it soon becomes apparent that the elderly female writer has some real family skeletons in her closet.   As a reader I soon hated the house she grew up in.   The story is told in a manner that keeps you guessing about many aspects of the people involved right up to the ending.   If a reader can get through the first of the book and keep reading it will be well worth the effort.    Click on the title of the book and the author's name above to follow the links to learn more.