Kam
The Homecoming
So I went into this expecting a haunted house story of some sort, maybe an eel-based cult (because this was pushed as folk horror), but I didn’t get the latter and only a little bit of the former. Which wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, except this book has bigger problems than a mismatch in terms of expectations.
For the most part this novel felt like a bit of a genre mess. The writing’s lovely, don’t get me wrong, and the core themes of female friendship and parenting are very interesting ones, but the way the author tried to convey those themes felt very clunky. On one hand, there’s the gothic story about Elver House and its sole resident; on the other, there’s the narrator/protagonist’s relationship with her unnamed friend, whom she addresses as “you” throughout the story. The problem is that the narrative hops between the goings-on at Elver House, and talking to the unnamed friend, with the narrator/protagonist sharing snippets of their past together, with nothing to directly connect the two except for the narrator/protagonist’s stream of consciousness. This essentially breaks the back of the novel’s structure: it can’t decide whether it wants to be a gothic novel, or a literary story about female friendship and motherhood. Not to say that it isn’t POSSIBLE for those two themes to coexist and work together in a single novel, but the way THIS novel tries to go about it just doesn’t work.
It also doesn’t help that the novel’s twist is a rather tired old trope that was not executed very well, either. I won’t get into it much because of spoilers, but suffice to say that it was very much a letdown and pretty much ruined the latter end of the novel for me. While I’m sure there are ways to use that particular twist and have it come off well, it just did NOT work in this one, likely for the reason I gave earlier about the novel’s overall structure being broken.
What’s sad is that I can SEE this novel working quite well. As I’ve said earlier, the writing is lovely, and the characters are quite well-developed. The same can be said for the setting: the way Elver House was first described in the novel really sucked me in and convinced me to read this story to the end. But sadly, all of that initial promise dims and goes dark by the time the reader reaches the novel’s climax.
Overall, this could have been a very good read - if only the structure had not been so broken. The writing, character development, and setting are all wonderful, and there is much promise in the novel’s first third, but sadly by the time the reader gets to the end, the novel’s bad structure will have dimmed, then eliminated, any shine of potential the book initially had.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.
So I went into this expecting a haunted house story of some sort, maybe an eel-based cult (because this was pushed as folk horror), but I didn’t get the latter and only a little bit of the former. Which wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, except this book has bigger problems than a mismatch in terms of expectations.
For the most part this novel felt like a bit of a genre mess. The writing’s lovely, don’t get me wrong, and the core themes of female friendship and parenting are very interesting ones, but the way the author tried to convey those themes felt very clunky. On one hand, there’s the gothic story about Elver House and its sole resident; on the other, there’s the narrator/protagonist’s relationship with her unnamed friend, whom she addresses as “you” throughout the story. The problem is that the narrative hops between the goings-on at Elver House, and talking to the unnamed friend, with the narrator/protagonist sharing snippets of their past together, with nothing to directly connect the two except for the narrator/protagonist’s stream of consciousness. This essentially breaks the back of the novel’s structure: it can’t decide whether it wants to be a gothic novel, or a literary story about female friendship and motherhood. Not to say that it isn’t POSSIBLE for those two themes to coexist and work together in a single novel, but the way THIS novel tries to go about it just doesn’t work.
It also doesn’t help that the novel’s twist is a rather tired old trope that was not executed very well, either. I won’t get into it much because of spoilers, but suffice to say that it was very much a letdown and pretty much ruined the latter end of the novel for me. While I’m sure there are ways to use that particular twist and have it come off well, it just did NOT work in this one, likely for the reason I gave earlier about the novel’s overall structure being broken.
What’s sad is that I can SEE this novel working quite well. As I’ve said earlier, the writing is lovely, and the characters are quite well-developed. The same can be said for the setting: the way Elver House was first described in the novel really sucked me in and convinced me to read this story to the end. But sadly, all of that initial promise dims and goes dark by the time the reader reaches the novel’s climax.
Overall, this could have been a very good read - if only the structure had not been so broken. The writing, character development, and setting are all wonderful, and there is much promise in the novel’s first third, but sadly by the time the reader gets to the end, the novel’s bad structure will have dimmed, then eliminated, any shine of potential the book initially had.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.