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saguaros 's review for:
A House with Good Bones
by T. Kingfisher
2.5
I think your appreciation of this book will depend highly on the amount of patience you have for highly logical/rational characters in supernatural stories. I’ll be frank: my patience for it is pretty low. I think I’ve mentioned this in an older review somewhere, possibly for another Kingfisher book, but I feel like authors who write supernatural books—especially ones with phenomenons that aren’t immediately obvious or in your face—have to play a tricky balancing game between making characters who do not know they are in a supernatural story believable, and readers who know they are reading said kind of story. You don’t want your characters to jump to the “it must be ghosts/aliens/vampires” conclusion too quickly, but if they take too long it just becomes maddeningly frustrating. Turns out, that as far as I’m concerned, given the choice, I would prefer a character that embraces the supernatural too fast than one who takes to long.
Sam, the heroine of this novel, takes too fucking long.
Kingfisher once tweeted something to the effect that if she were a character in a horror movie (or something similar) she’d be the one yelling “there must be a rational explanation” while being devoured by the monster. Sam is pretty much like that. Even as she was staring the supernatural quite literally in the face, she was still trying to tell herself it was an hallucination. It’s not unrealistic or anything. But I find it deeply frustrating and annoying. Yes, of course at first you’re gonna think it’s sleep paralysis. Of course you’re gonna think your mother is maybe having some form of early onset dementia. You’re gonna find rational explanations for weird but not totally impossible events and behaviours. Of course. But I am a reader who knows she’s reading a book about a haunted house and I have known this since the beginning and the unwillingness of a character to just communicate with her mother, or even entertain the possibility that there might be something afoot that isn’t as easily explained until her face is quite literally shoved in it about 65% into the book, and STILL having a hard time accepting it, made me want to scream. The final payoff of her embracing it, felt too little, too late when it finally came, not enough to make all that frustration worth it.
THAT SAID. I read the book in two days (which is fast for me for anything longer than a novella). As per usual, Kingfisher’s writing is fluid and dynamic, her ideas fun and creepy. And I always adore the ways she roots a lot of her ideas and plots into the natural world—here: insects (our heroine is an entomologist), roses, vultures.
I do think this is one of her weakest, though. Her heroines (especially the ones in contemporary stories) always tend to be practical and snarky, clever and awkward, but she pushed it a bit too far with Sam. Too many random asides, too many rambles. Not a bad read by any stretch, but not a fave of hers either. Like I said though, this might be a lot of fun if you don’t mind any of those things as much as I do.
I think your appreciation of this book will depend highly on the amount of patience you have for highly logical/rational characters in supernatural stories. I’ll be frank: my patience for it is pretty low. I think I’ve mentioned this in an older review somewhere, possibly for another Kingfisher book, but I feel like authors who write supernatural books—especially ones with phenomenons that aren’t immediately obvious or in your face—have to play a tricky balancing game between making characters who do not know they are in a supernatural story believable, and readers who know they are reading said kind of story. You don’t want your characters to jump to the “it must be ghosts/aliens/vampires” conclusion too quickly, but if they take too long it just becomes maddeningly frustrating. Turns out, that as far as I’m concerned, given the choice, I would prefer a character that embraces the supernatural too fast than one who takes to long.
Sam, the heroine of this novel, takes too fucking long.
Kingfisher once tweeted something to the effect that if she were a character in a horror movie (or something similar) she’d be the one yelling “there must be a rational explanation” while being devoured by the monster. Sam is pretty much like that. Even as she was staring the supernatural quite literally in the face, she was still trying to tell herself it was an hallucination. It’s not unrealistic or anything. But I find it deeply frustrating and annoying. Yes, of course at first you’re gonna think it’s sleep paralysis. Of course you’re gonna think your mother is maybe having some form of early onset dementia. You’re gonna find rational explanations for weird but not totally impossible events and behaviours. Of course. But I am a reader who knows she’s reading a book about a haunted house and I have known this since the beginning and the unwillingness of a character to just communicate with her mother, or even entertain the possibility that there might be something afoot that isn’t as easily explained until her face is quite literally shoved in it about 65% into the book, and STILL having a hard time accepting it, made me want to scream. The final payoff of her embracing it, felt too little, too late when it finally came, not enough to make all that frustration worth it.
THAT SAID. I read the book in two days (which is fast for me for anything longer than a novella). As per usual, Kingfisher’s writing is fluid and dynamic, her ideas fun and creepy. And I always adore the ways she roots a lot of her ideas and plots into the natural world—here: insects (our heroine is an entomologist), roses, vultures.
I do think this is one of her weakest, though. Her heroines (especially the ones in contemporary stories) always tend to be practical and snarky, clever and awkward, but she pushed it a bit too far with Sam. Too many random asides, too many rambles. Not a bad read by any stretch, but not a fave of hers either. Like I said though, this might be a lot of fun if you don’t mind any of those things as much as I do.