The Thirteenth Tale
Ratings81
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings81
Average rating3.8
Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness -- featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess,a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
Reviews with the most likes.
The premise of the book sounds interesting. It has nearly everything. A family secret, a ghost, twins, a mystery, a fire. Unfortunately the book becomes clogged with too much. The characters all start to blend. They appear for a handful of pages, then dissappear. When they reappear you're left struggling to remember who is who. At first I tried to separate the characters by what they did, the gardener, the twins. then the characters with those titles kept multiplying. Honestly, a book does not need more than 1 set of twins as main characters In a book. It became so confusing that I kept having to give up or flip back. It was like a sink full of dirty dishes and food scraps on thanksgiving night. There were thing everywhere. Cleaning the dishes should have been the main focus. Instead, in this book, the author decided to ignore the dishes and try to identify all the floating food scraps.
Dark and creepy mysteries. Family secrets. Brooding mansions. Dusty libraries. Crazy Bertha locked up in the opposite tower. Setterfield has pulled off a classic romantic mystery, although the worst her heroine Margaret suffers is a nasty cold from having wandered the gardens at night with no wrap. No knife-wielding crazy people chasing her, no suspicious young men befriending her, just an old lady who may or may not be telling her the truth.
Heavily influenced by the Bronte sisters and Yorkshire landscapes. If you thought Jane Eyre was stuffy or Wuthering Heights was creepy, you won't like this book.
This is a book about books and people who read them. A bookstore, a writer, a researcher, several libraries. As the researcher interviews the author prior to writing her biography, the mystery of the author's life is investigated and solved.
Fragments that caught my attention:
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
