My top reads of 2016

Ghosts of memories

Book review: Haunted Ground by Irina Shapiro

Imagine having a strange fascination for a country you have never visited, imagine feeling a pull towards a house you don't even know exists, imagine feeling a certainty that you belong to a particular place more than anywhere else in the world. That is how Alexandra Maxwell (or Lexi as she prefers to be called) has always felt - that she somehow belongs to England, to a place steeped in history. 

Her dreams of visiting England have always been ignored by her American parents, but they become a reality when her father passes away, leaving her the family business. She promptly sells off the business and flies to England to buy a house which she can convert into her own Bed & Breakfast.

That is how she lands up in a small, remote village in Lincolnshire not even on the map and discovers the house that she has always unconsciously searched for:

The house loomed in front of me. tall and gray; the stone walls bleached by decades of sunshine and rain and buffeted by wind, the south side dressed in a thick coat of ivy that crept almost as far as the gabled roof. The half-lowered blinds in the upstairs windows gave the impression of hooded eyes, wearily watching me as I stood there on the lawn, my whole being flooded with joy and a sudden sense of deja vu. 
This was it; this was the house I'd been looking for. I didn't know where I would find it, but I knew exactly what it would be like, and how I would feel when I finally saw it.

Lexi discovers a faded sign announcing that the house is up for sale and immediately contacts the estate agent to buy it. The agent, Paula, is overjoyed to have sold off the property which had apparently been on the market for a long time. She tells Lexi that the property had belonged to an old lady named Mrs. Hughes whose ancestors had lived in the house since its construction in the seventeenth century. The house is bordered by trees and an old creek, beside which Lexi spots a mysterious ruin. It seems the ruin is part of the property and the old owner even left a stipulation in her will that the ruin is not to be demolished. The ruin obviously is an older structure than the house but no one seems to know for what purpose it was built or who it originally belonged to.

From here, the novel starts alternating between the past (1650) and present, with two different story lines - the seventeenth century plot about a soldier named Brendan Carr in Oliver Cromwell's army, and the present-day story about Lexi's first days in the house. In the past, Brendan is disillusioned with Oliver Cromwell's cruel battles against the Scottish and deserts the army. He returns home, only to find that his father is dead, his younger brother has usurped his property and his fiancee, his beloved sister Meg is widowed and his mother is on the deathbed. His scheming brother, Jasper, throws him out of the house and  sends men to murder him on the highway. Brendan is able to kill the assassins but is severely wounded in the process. He somehow manages to reach his uncle Caleb's house in Lincolnshire, where an old priest gives him shelter and a young girl called Rowan nurses him back to health. Even as a tender relationship starts growing between Brendan and the mute Rowan, they are surrounded by enemies and traitors - Jasper, Rowan's betrothed Stephen and spies sent by Cromwell to capture Rowan.

Oliver Cromwell

In the present, Lexi hires a contracting agency owned by a handsome Scot, Aidan Mackay, to restore and redesign the house. As Aidan and his workers dispose off the old furniture, Lexi slowly starts settling down in the house. She notices a man who emerges from the ruin every evening to pray in front of an old tree and then goes back dejectedly inside the ruin. One night, she wakes up to see a faint candle burning on the second floor of the ruin and a man, similar to the one she had seen earlier, reading a book. But in the morning, when she and Aidan go into the ruin, they find that the second floor and stairs no longer exist and even the roof has caved in; no living person could have actually climbed up to the second floor. So who is the man Lexi had seen? Why does Lexi keep seeing the same sad man every day at twilight? If he is a ghost, is he in some way tied to the ruin? Why does he seem to repent in front of the tree endlessly? One day, while digging up an old wall in the basement of the house, Aidan's workers find a locked room which it seems hasn't been opened in centuries. They break down the door to find a coffin with a skeleton inside. The name 'Brendan Carr' is engraved on the coffin, but no one in the village or vicinity seems to know who Brendan Carr or his descendants were. 

To add to the mystery of the past, there seems to be a mystery in the present too about Lexi's background. Some old residents of the village seem to recognize Lexi and express happiness that she has finally found her way back to where she belongs. Lexi is confused by what they mean but no one wants to explain their strange comment. She comes to know purely by chance that a murder had taken place in her house some twenty years back - when Mrs. Hughes' daughter Kelly was murdered by her husband. She is driven to know more about how she is connected to the house. Who is Lexi really? What secrets are people hiding from her? Who can lead her to the truth?

As skeletons in the closet are revealed, both literally and figuratively, Lexi realizes that she needs to find the answers to the questions plaguing her past and present, so that she can move on. She gets support from Aidan in this and there is a nice little romance between the two, but this is largely overshadowed by the poignant and doomed love story of Brendan and Rowan in the seventeenth century. How are the two story lines tied together? How are the ruin and the house connected? What eventually happens to Brendan and Rowan? Are the ghosts of the past and the present laid to rest at last by Lexi? To find out, you have to read "Haunted Ground" yourself :) I liked the book and would recommend it to lovers of paranormal or past-present mysteries.

Of visions and illusions, mediums and magic!

Book review: Born of Illusion by Teri Brown

I've always been fascinated by seances and spirit mediums, tarot readings and magical illusions. I have read quite a few books on this theme set in the Jazz Age when seances and mediums were all the rage, especially because of the number of grieving widows and parents who wanted to contact the spirits of soldiers killed in World War I. The books set in this time period that I really enjoyed are "The Other Side of Midnight" by Simone St. James and "Things Half in Shadow" by Alan Finn. I also liked Jaime Lee Moyer's Delia Martin series about a woman in San Francisco of 1906 who can see and communicate with ghosts. Hence it is small wonder that I picked up Teri Brown's "Born of Illusion" which promised to be about a young and gifted illusionist experiencing frightening visions. While this is part of a series, I figured out from Goodreads reviews that each book is a standalone novel and this one is undoubtedly the best of the lot.

"Born of Illusion" is about a young girl, Anna Van Housen, whose mother is a popular spirit medium in post-World War I New York. Anna has had a lonely and unconventional childhood, moving from place to place, while her mother performed in physic shows in various small towns and cities. Her mother, Marguerite, is a stunning beauty who is always hungry for fame and fortune but has no real psychic abilities. She relies on tricks and fake illusions to make her stage shows and seances seem real. Only Anna knows her secret. Marguerite has also changed her real name to gain popularity and has spread rumours that Anna is the illegitimate daughter of the famous magician, Harry Houdini, and even Anna doesn't know if that's  true or another of her mother's elaborate deceptions. Anna is fascinated by magic and has taught herself various magic tricks over the years. Her dream is to perform independent of her mother and become an acknowledged illusionist, which is a difficult thing to do in an age when female magicians are rare and the ones that do practice are not taken seriously.

Source: pininterest.com

When the book starts, Anna and her mother have recently moved to New York as a result of her mother having found a well-connected manager, Jacques. Anna is happy that their days of barely scraping through and evading the law seem to be over and that they are now able to live in a well-to-do neighbourhood. Anna is the responsible one in the family, knowing that her flighty and unreliable mother is incapable to being prudent in money or household matters. She has a strange love-hate relationship with her mother - she loves Marguerite but is wary of her controlling and grasping nature. Anna agrees to be part of her mother's stage show in New York, where she demonstrates magical card tricks as the opening act before her mother's psychic act starts. She has always known that she has more psychic talent than her mother and struggles to keep that fact hidden from her jealous mother, as her act gains more popularity. She increasingly wonders if her powers have been inherited from her alleged father, the mysterious Houdini, and feels a strong desire to meet him in person.

Anna has more secrets that she has kept from her mother and everyone else - she is able to sense the emotions of people through touch and sometimes sees uncanny visions of impending disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Spanish influenza epidemic. Her visions suddenly increase in frequency and this time they are frighteningly personal - she sees her mother in danger and feels herself drowning and unable to save her mother. She also starts experiencing emotions of others more strongly, even without touching them. During one of her mother's seances, Anna is unexpectedly able to communicate with a spirit - something that she has never able to do before. To add to her constant feeling of impending doom, the spirit Walter warns her that her life is in danger.

Source: pininterest.com

Anna's personal life is also in turmoil. She meets an attractive young neighbour Cole, who she feels a strange connection to. Her senses are heightened whenever Cole is near, but she is not able to trust him completely as he seems to have his own ulterior motive in befriending her. Anna is suspicious of her mother's manager Jacques, whose emotions are obscure to her even when she touches him. She also meets Owen, Jacques' dashing nephew, who seems to be interested in courting her. She accidentally comes across Harry Houdini and cannot restrain herself from revealing her illusionist abilities to him.

Things start becoming more complicated when some of her mother's clients start acting weirdly, she discovers the existence of a society which investigates paranormal abilities and realizes that Houdini himself is bent on unmasking phony mediums. Anna is caught between trying to protect her mother, discovering whether Houdini knows about her existence and fighting her growing attraction to Cole. All the while, she continues to question whether her own mother loves her enough and whether she will ever be able to move out of her mother's shadow.

Who can Anna truly trust - Cole or Owen? Can she reveal her true abilities to Dr. Bennett, an erstwhile member of the Society for Psychical Research? What is Jacques' hidden agenda? How much can she reveal to her own mother? What are her visions warning her about? Can she stop these events from happening in the future? All these questions start plaguing Anna and the reader. Though I managed to figure out the culprit before the final revelation, it was still an engrossing read and one I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone who enjoys a light, paranormal mystery about the coming-of-age of a likable heroine with unusual psychic abilities.

Too many characters spoil the brew

Book review: All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness

This is a hugely popular trilogy with legions of followers on the net - a series which catapulted a hitherto unknown author to bestseller charts overnight. One of my book-loving friends had read the first book and had recommended it to me. So obviously I started reading the series last week with high expectations. 

“It begins with absence and desire.
It begins with blood and fear.
It begins with a discovery of witches.” 

"A Discovery of Witches" is the first book of the series and undoubtedly the best one of the lot. It is an odd book to review - while I didn't exactly adore the book, I didn't dislike it either. There were certain elements which I found interesting and I was willing to invest more money and time to read the next two books. That is when the things which were mildly irritating in the first book really went on to become full-blown, frustrating habits of the author - her incredibly slow pacing of the plot, penchant for introducing numerous random characters with no relationship to the story, tendency to over-indulge in her pet passions such as history and science, and propensity to tell the readers repeatedly about a person's character rather than showing them. 

Source: gettyimages

The series starts with Diana Bishop, an intelligent and respected professor of Oxford and Yale who during her research in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University accidentally discovers an enchanted old manuscript, or to be more accurate, a palimpsest. Mysterious writings appear on the book and she realizes that it has something to do with magic. Diana comes from a long line of witches, with both her parents being witches. However, following her parent's brutal murder when she just was a child, she has refused to be in contact with any form of magic. So she hastily returns the bewitched book, Ashmole 782, to the library and walks away unconcerned about it till a host of magical creatures start following her to get their hands on the book. We come to know that besides humans, the world is inhabited by three types of supernatural  creatures - witches, vampires and daemons, each race with unique abilities and strictly forbidden to intermingle with the other races, as part of an ancient Covenant enforced by a dictatorial Congregation. The foremost among the supernatural creatures who pursue Diana is a 1500 year old vampire called Matthew Clairmont, a handsome and distinguished professor of biochemistry.

There is a case of insta-love here and I felt my first disconnect with the story. As a connoisseur of the romance genre, I savour deeply felt romances where the hero and the heroine share a bond beyond words. I have often immersed myself in words written by many gifted authors who have made me feel every glance and every touch fraught with meaning that is exchanged between the lead pair. In this book, Diana and Matthew talk a lot about their forbidden love and apparently do a lot of things for love, yet throughout it I felt no passion between them, even less than that between Twilight's Edward and Bella (which I hadn't thought was possible!). I never did understand how and why Diana and Matthew fell in love so fast, given that they are mature adults and not infatuated teenagers in the throes of their first crush. In fact, this entire series left me strangely untouched at the emotional level, and hence I never did care much for the main characters.

Matthew is too good to be true - super rich, intelligent, famous, respected and excelling at everything he does - vampire, scientist, aristocrat, spy, warrior, prince, knight - is there anything he isn't competent at? Yet his ideas about women leave a lot to be desired. He spends inordinate amounts of time bossing Diana around, growling for no apparent reason and making stupid decisions which are never fully explained, such as the climax at the end of the series. Why exactly did he do something as stupid as surrendering to the antagonist - just so that Diana could steal the limelight at the end, as the author had intended to all along? We are repeatedly told how deadly and dangerous Matthew is,  especially with all the "blood rage" thing going on, in the second and third books. But his actions never demonstrate these tendencies and I never felt the danger that is supposedly his second nature. Trust me, I have read about a lot of deadly assassin heroes who have a ruthless and deeply tortured side to them, but Matthew just felt like a cardboard assassin to me.

Source: getlink.youtube.com

Diana is only marginally better - she started grating on my nerves in the first book when she, an apparently independent woman, appeared content to rely on and be guided by Matthew, just because she was in love with him. Her stubborn refusal to use magic and insistence that magic was at the root of all problems, in spite of evidence to the contrary, was also frustrating. However, I liked her a little better than Matthew because in the end of the first book, she saved Matthew from a female vampire bent on revenge and in the second book, she started raising the issue of who wears the pants in their relationship. I also liked her learning how to create and weave spells and her bonding with the witches in the sixteenth century.

Book 1 still passed muster because of characters such as Ysabeau and the Bishop House (which is a character in itself, complete with magical mischievous tendencies and resident ghosts). I had liked the climax of the first book and was willing to forgive the author's tendency to go off the track and repeat herself, thinking that she might get better with time.

In Book 2, "Shadow of Night", Matthew and Diana are supposedly time-travelling to Elizabethan London in the sixteenth century to retrieve Ashmole 782, better known as the "Book of Life" which is purported to contain the secrets of evolution of all the three types of supernatural species. However what do they actually do after reaching there? They spend time debating with the prominent historical figures of the Elizabethan era including Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Mary Sidney, Shakespeare and even Queen Elizabeth, get married again in France at Sire Phillippe's insistence, and adopt two unknown orphans Jack and Anne. Why were so many characters introduced and what bearing did they have to the main story? I have no idea.

Source: guardian.uk

The author wakes up towards the end and Diana and Phillip realize that Diana still hasn't learnt any magic and they have not tracked the book either and there is a hasty scramble to get back to the plot! I would have liked to see more of the witches who taught Diana and learn more about the firedrake Corra's background. Instead we get to meet Rudolf II, the lecherous Holy Roman Emperor and some other extraneous characters in Prague who only confuse the story further. At the tail end, we come across the main villain who it is soon revealed is the root cause of all the mess. Book 2 was the worst of the three books and I skimmed through it, omitting a large number of pages where nothing significant happened. The only redeeming features of Book 2 were the introduction of Phillippe, Matthew's omnipotent father, and the funny Gallowglass (my favourite character in the series).

By Book 3, "The Book of Life", I had almost given up hopes of the author redeeming herself and this was almost a DNF for me. I skipped chapters in the middle and only then was able to complete it. However, it turned out to be better than the second book. I liked the camaraderie among the family and friends of Diana and Matthew and their willingness to stand by our lead pair in times of crisis. However, more irrelevant characters were introduced such as the witches of Madison, the present-day London witch coven, Diana's scientist friend Chris, her librarian friend (Lucy I think) and members of the dreaded Congregation. Conversely, I didn't get to see more of characters I had found interesting, such as Andrew Hubbard - he had an intriguing background and came across as a thought-provoking character. I would also have liked to see more of Corra, Diana's mother Rebecca, the Bishop House and the ghost Bridget Bishop. Aunt Emily's fate is also never fully explained - what she had been trying to achieve and why. My biggest complaint is that not enough time was devoted in the end to explaining how the "Book of Life"will be put to use, considering that gaining it had been the objective of the entire series. Again, Gallowglass and Ysabeau were the only characters I liked, though I kind of liked Jack too. I have a feeling that we will have a sequel featuring Gallowglass in the near future (which I suspect will again be 800 pages long and which I won't subject myself to!).

Source: Fotor

This series had all the ingredients of an entrancing novel - a forbidden love story, an urban paranormal fantasy, a literary mystery, an epic battle - and I really wanted to like it. However, I can only rate it at 2.5 out of 5, and that rating is just because of its interesting premise and not its actual execution. All in all, it may be worth a one-time read if you are curious to know what all the hype is about, but be prepared to skip large portions of the second and third books if you want to ever complete the series and not fall asleep mid-way!

A sinful and addictive dark chocolate!

You may have noticed that I have been absent for full five days. In case you are wondering about the cause of my absence from this blog, I had disappeared behind a magical portal opened by a book series that was as sinfully addictive as rich, dark chocolate - Juliet Dark's "Fairwick Chronicles":

For the uninitiated, Juliet Dark is the alter ego of the acclaimed writer of gothic mysteries, Carol Goodman. The same series is also available with alternate titles and with the author's real name on the cover.

"This is where all stories start, on the edge of a dark wood.."

- proclaims the summary of "Incubus" or "The Demon Lover", the first book of the Fairwick Chronicles, and it was enough to send a delicious shiver of anticipation down my spine! After four days of reading the three books in a mad rush, I have finally managed to extricate myself from the haze induced by this series Now that I'm back to my normal state, the time has come to review it :).

Book review: Fairwick Chronicles trilogy by Carol Goodman

This series is a curious, genre-bending, riveting mixture of gothic, paranormal, romance and fantasy - a departure in many ways from Goodman's standard genre, yet retaining her trademark writing style. The first book is the most creative of the series, and shows the author's love for old gothic romances such as Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", Ann Radcliffe's "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca". Goodman pays a fitting tribute to the various facets of the gothic genre, both through her heroine Callie's college lectures and through her story.

Cailleach McFay, better known as Callie, has a doctorate in folklore and gothic fiction (I want to study this too!) and has written a popular book on demon lovers in gothic literature. She has been fascinated by fairy tales and folklore since childhood, not surprising considering that her late parents were archaeologists exploring Celtic myths. As a teenager, she had imagined that she had a shadowy companion who came to meet her at night in her dreams. To exorcise the dreams, she had taken up gothic literature as her research area, and ended up specializing in it.

Gothic romance; Source: coolchaser.com

As the book begins, Callie is offered a teaching post at the remote Fairwick college, a lesser known village near New York, in the shadows of the Catskill mountains and bordered by a thousand acres of virgin forest. The description of the village and the college are atmospheric, and I could alomost visualize the vine-covered gothic library and the ivy-shrouded Victorian cottages.

As Callie wanders around Fairwick for the first time, the forest affects her in a strange way:

I paused for a moment at the edge of a narrow trail, peering into the shadows. Even though the day was bright, the woods were dark. Vines lopped from tree to tree, filling every crevice and twisting into curious shapes....

A wind came up and blew out of the woods toward me, carrying with it the chill scent of pine needles, damp earth and something sweet. Honeysuckle?...

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The breeze curled around me, tickling the damp at the back of my neck and lifting the ends of my long hair like a hand caressing me.

Callie sees an old house covered in honeysuckle, right at the edge of the forest, somehow merging with the woods:

It was hidden from the road by a dense, overgrown hedge. Even without the hedge, the house would have been hard to see because it blended in so well with its surroundings....The honeysuckle from the forest had encroached over the porch railings..

I stepped a few feet closer and a breeze stirred a loose vine over the door. It waved to me as though it were beckoning me to come closer..

Above the doorway in the pediment, was a wood carving of a man's face, a pagan god of the forest, I thought, from the pinecone wreath resting on his abundant flowing hair. I'd seen a face like it somewhere before...perhaps in a book on forest deities...

I turned to leave. The wind picked up, lifting the green pollen from the porch floor and blowing it into little funnels around my feet as I hurried down the steps...

The vines that were twisted around the porch columns creaked and strained. A loose trailer snapped against my arm as I reached the ground...

When I reached the hedge, I turned around to look back at the house. It gave one more sigh as the wind stopped, its clapboard walls moaning as if sorry to see me go, and then it settled on its foundation and sat back, staring at me.

I couldn't resist myself from quoting that entire passage because after that eerie description, I was so enthralled that my gothic-loving heart was doing a joyful little jig!:)

Source: www.wvexplorer.com

Callie, of course, can't  resist the pull of the house and realizing that it's up for sale, she impulsively buys it. Her acquaintances, the inn-keeper Diana Hart, and the college dean, Dean Book, warn her that the house is haunted. Apparently it has remained uninhabited for the last twenty years, ever since the previous owner died. Before that, it had originally belonged to Dahlia LaMotte, a popular gothic novelist who had written some bodice-ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century before they went out of fashion.

Callie begins to have vivid dreams of a man made of moonlight and shadows, and her room is filled with the fragrance of honeysuckle every night.

Each piece of him took shape and weight as the moonlight touched it. It was as if he were made of shadow and the moonlight was the knife sculpting him into being, each stroke of the knife giving him form...and weight....

He felt like a wave crashing over me, a moonlit wave that sucked me down below the surf and pulled me out into the sea, onto a crest...

I must confess that I had been hesitant to pick up "The Incubus" thinking that it might verge on erotica but I need not have worried. In Goodman's deft hands, the descriptions of the physical aspect of love are poetic and passionate, but never explicit. In fact, true to the style of old gothic romances, the more intimate descriptions are largely left to the imagination. Yet the midnight encounters between Callie and her shadow lover manage to convey a deep and boundless passion, almost bordering on obsession:

I was standing in the dark, on the threshold between shadow and moonlight, where he always waited. And someone was knocking....
The moonlight rushed in with the wind - a wind that smelled like honeysuckle and salt - and circled around me like an angry riptide. 
I'd heard somewhere that if you are drowning, you should relax and let the current take you. I did that now and the current turned warm and carried me down into the darkness,...where he lived.

Callie discovers some old manuscripts of Dahlia LaMotte's work in the attic and finds that Dahlia's writing strangely mirrors her own nightly experiences. She begins to suspect that the house  is truly is haunted by a spectre or the gothic setting is influencing her fertile imagination to an alarming degree. As if that wasn't enough, the residents of Fairwick start acting strangely too, and Callie discovers that no one is as they seem on the surface.

Who is the shadow haunting Callie's dreams? Is he a ghost or a figment of Callie's imagination? Is he the same shadow that Callie used to see when she was young? What connection does he have with Callie? Did Dahlia LaMotte dream of the same man? What secrets are the Fairwick residents hiding? Who is Callie really?

All these questions build up slowly in the mind of the reader, as Goodman unfolds her brilliantly imaginative plot. A cast of intriguing characters is introduced, both young and old, who inhabit Fairwick and are an integral part of its chronicles. There are fairy tales skillfully woven into the story such as the tale of Tam Lin, as well as historical details such as the Scottish plague and witch hunts. There are quite a number of surprising twists in the tale, some which left me shocked and wondering how the author would resolve the resultant mess. Sometimes the sweeping tale does become a bit repetitive like in the second book, or mired in complications like in the third book, but the author expertly manages to pull all the tangled threads together by the end.

Source: www.pininterest.com

What I really liked was that the trilogy evolves into a fascinating saga of star-crossed love - an intensely romantic story spanning magic and reality, encompassing past and present, and spread across continents. To my romance-loving soul, submerging in the story was like indulging in a deep, dark and tempting chocolate, which is sometimes seductive, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter but which one absolutely can't do without. While the first book is undoubtedly the best in terms of the gothic element, the other two books continue the magical journey of the lovers unknowingly meeting and losing each other, time after time.

What came once here will never come again,
no matter monument nor memory;
all sun-warmed green succumbs to winter's wind...

yet sun will brighten wind so,

one knows that soon green stirs, and wild bees hum.

And summer once more will make winter liar,

but I won't warm. You're all I'll ever desire.

Where does their story start and where does it end? Are they destined to remain separated for an eternity? To know that, you have to read the series :)