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A review by duggimon
The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola
2.0
Where do I even start with this? This book is all over the place, not in a good way though. It starts as quite a bland, prosaic tale of Audrey, a 24 year old woman who's run away from a father and step-mother she can't live with anymore and has fled to Skye to research folk tales. That's not a bad setup, I like stories about folk tales, about cold and remote island communities, I'm not averse to historical fiction and the book does begin setting up a mystery, which will always help drag a story along.
However, it's all just done badly. Well, not even badly, just with no spark, no interest, no imagination, there's almost nothing here. The folk tales are few and far between and either pointlessly short or told in bits and pieces. Audrey is pretty unlikeable as a character, which is explained (spoiler alert she's being poisoned) but I don't care, I just want her to stop droning on about what's real and what's not. There's a central mystery about disappearing girls (spoiler alert it's not that mysterious, there's only two people who might conceivably be responsible and, spoiler alert, it was both of them) and there's some doubt about whether the fairies took them. I wish they had.
The backdrop of the Highland Clearances is never really delved into in any kind of meaningful way, it's just largely there as a reason for the locals of Skye to not talk to Audrey. Now this helps delay the central mystery of the book but it really gets in the way. Audrey is dull and if nobody talks to her then all we get is the inner musings of her toadstool addled brain for a solid half the book or more.
The end, when it finally comes, ties everything up so neatly I actually laughed, the telegram from her step-mother was utterly hilarious. It just underlined the lack of any complexity to this book, which isn't always necessary for a book to be good but would have been extremely welcome here. The blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality just doesn't really work well when the main heft of the book is so prosaic.
However, it's all just done badly. Well, not even badly, just with no spark, no interest, no imagination, there's almost nothing here. The folk tales are few and far between and either pointlessly short or told in bits and pieces. Audrey is pretty unlikeable as a character, which is explained (spoiler alert she's being poisoned) but I don't care, I just want her to stop droning on about what's real and what's not. There's a central mystery about disappearing girls (spoiler alert it's not that mysterious, there's only two people who might conceivably be responsible and, spoiler alert, it was both of them) and there's some doubt about whether the fairies took them. I wish they had.
The backdrop of the Highland Clearances is never really delved into in any kind of meaningful way, it's just largely there as a reason for the locals of Skye to not talk to Audrey. Now this helps delay the central mystery of the book but it really gets in the way. Audrey is dull and if nobody talks to her then all we get is the inner musings of her toadstool addled brain for a solid half the book or more.
The end, when it finally comes, ties everything up so neatly I actually laughed, the telegram from her step-mother was utterly hilarious. It just underlined the lack of any complexity to this book, which isn't always necessary for a book to be good but would have been extremely welcome here. The blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality just doesn't really work well when the main heft of the book is so prosaic.