Reviews

The Turnglass is two books in one, each story related to the other and building off elements introduced in the other story. One story takes place in Victorian England, when Oliver visits a distant relative in his isolated home to treat him for an unknown illness, and along the way unravels the mystery of the insane woman confined to a glass cell in his house. Meanwhile, in 1930s California, aspiring actor Ken finds himself swept into a friend's family mystery involving a decades-old kidnapping and a strange death.

I've seen other reviewers saying that whichever story you read first is the one you'll like better, and while it's true that I read the Victorian story first and liked it more, I think this still would have been the case had I read the California story first. The Victorian story sets up a gothic atmosphere from the first pages and maintains it fairly consistently throughout the book. The mystery, while slow moving at times, was interesting enough to keep me reading and guessing about where the story was going to go. My largest criticism of this half of the book involves a secret journal that Oliver discovers as part of his investigation. Events leading up to Oliver's arrival at the house are related in the journal, clueing Oliver and the reader in to a much-needed backstory that clears up a lot of the blanks left in Oliver's investigation. However, the writing style of the journal is almost identical to the writing style of the rest of the narrative, robbing the author of the journal from any distinct voice. Further, the journal recounts events in such detail, down to recalling long conversations verbatim, that it really strained the believability of that part of the story. However, I did find the mystery satisfying and enjoyed the little twists, especially as they were foreshadowed enough that a keen reader would be able to pick up on them. There were some elements revealed near the end that I found to be annoyingly simple and unoriginal and didn't really add much to the book.

I found the mystery in the California section of the book to be much less interesting and much more predictable. It took a lot longer for the mystery to get off the ground, and I found myself frustrated by the direction Ken's investigation often took. I couldn't understand why he was doing certain things that didn't seem to advance the mystery at all, when there seemed much more obvious routes to his investigation. Further, the twists were much more predictable in this half of the book, so there wasn't much of a sense of tension for me. I also felt that if I had read this half first, I wouldn't have gotten as much out of it or understood as much of what was going on.

Overall, I think this is a vert interesting premise for a book, but it unfortunately wasn't executed as well as it could have been. The story was often repetitive, with the author reiterating in detail things that had happened only a chapter or two earlier, and some of the descriptions - particularly in action or high-tension scenes - didn't tonally fit with what was happening. I found it annoying that the author described gunshots exactly the same way even when the action was being narrated by two different characters.

Even though the Victorian section of the book was my favorite, reading the other half kind of cheapened it for me, and took away the impact the Victorian section had on me. This book is intriguing enough that I would recommend it to anyone who finds the description interesting, but I wouldn't take a chance on The Turnglass if it doesn't sound like it's up your alley.

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC.

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