The turning

A young man takes a job as a nanny to two young children at their family home on a remove island. He senses that something is not quite right with the house, or with the children. He begins to see shadows and figures on the grounds and in the house, but he is unsure if they're real or if they're all a part of an elaborate plot to drive him insane.

This book reminds me of the Turn of the Screw in terms of plot, but little else. I know it's a YA book, but the writing was really bad. It's written in epistolary form, as the main character, Jack, writes letters to his girlfriend back home and, occasionally, his father. It failed, however, to match the dread and fear of the original. The characters fell flat and were simply one-dimensional copies of the original. This was, perhaps, due to the jocular tone of the letters. Jack's tone was one of dismissive nonchalance, half-joking and book-ending the incidents he experienced with unimportant details of his day, and questions about life back home. Perhaps this was Prose's attempt to imitate the voice of a teen boy, but it succeeded, at least for me, in removing the sense of terror and rapidly diminishing sanity that made the original so powerful

It's hard to rate this book, because it really does read like a Y.A. book, and not a particularly well-written one at that. And the ending...gah...the ending.

My advice: if you like The Turning of the Screw, do NOT read this book.