Creepy Irish ghost story...

Three dead women are found by the postman in a house at the end of a lane, in a small town just outside Dublin. One woman died from having her head bashed in, presumably by the shovel found upstairs, next to the emaciated bodies of her two nieces who had been imprisoned, fed rat poison, and slowly starved to death. Shortly after the grisly discovery, Niall, an aspiring graphic artist who works at the post office, finds an unclaimed package in the dead letter bin, mailed by Fiona Walsh (one of the dead girls) to "anyone at all" in the post office. It turns out to be Fiona's diary, and once Niall opens the book and begins to read, he is dragged into a world of fairy tales and evil. Fiona and her sisters grew up in a town in West Cork, and Niall goes there to follow the story.

How much of the tale is fanciful or exaggerated? How much is just a romantic telling of something very real and horrible? Fiona and her sister are dead -- and so is their Aunt Moira. They all had been involved with a traveling storyteller named Jim. And it is Jim's story that forms the spellbinding tale which leads to the final chapter of doom.

Read this one with the lights turned down low -- to get into the mood of horror and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. Or keep all the lights on to their full brightness so you won't get too freaked out. I give this book 3 1/2 stars for spinning such an intriguing yarn.

Beautiful but Haunting

Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, started her published writing career with the short (in page length) novel Housekeeping, published in 1980. Her writing is gorgeous and rich - I wanted to slow down and treasure the phrases and descriptions. But this is a novel that is short on plot and which focuses on character development. The narrator is Ruthie, who was raised by a number of relatives. Her mother, Helen, dropped Ruthie and her younger sister Lucille off at their grandmother's house just before she drove her car off a cliff into a lake. After their grandmother died a few years later, some old maiden great-aunts came to watch over them, but they were set in their ways, easily worried, and didn't "take" to child- rearing so they were happy to go back home when their mother's long-wandering sister Sylvie showed up to take over. The novel is awash in watery imagery. (get the pun?) They live in Fingerbone, a town perched beside a bottomless lake, into which their grandfather's train dove off the tracks on the long bridge which spans the lake. That tragedy (and their mother's suicide in that same lake) colors all their lives. Sylvie's care of Ruthie and Lucille doesn't meet the standards or expectations of the town or the school, and eventually people stop by and observe the hoarded piles of newspapers and tin cans, the rat droppings, and other signs of Sylvie's lack of "housekeeping." We learn that Sylvie has a hard time being tethered to any house, and Ruthie is increasingly drawn to Sylvie's dreamlike wanderings. Lucille, on the other hand, craves a life of normalcy.

As a lover of language, I appreciated the writing. I can see how Robinson was awarded a contract to write a second novel. But this one was just too drawn out and sad for me to give it any more than 2 out of 4 stars.

Asian American Romeo and Juliet

I was initially enamored of this book because it provided a personal insight into the experience of Japanese Americans who were mistrusted to the point of incarceration during WWII. Several neighbors in the housing cooperative where I have lived for almost 30 years had moved to the Chicago area after leaving the "relocation camps" in which they were imprisoned in the 1940's, and having heard just brief references to their experiences over the years, I was very interested to hear more about what might have happened to them.

The romance between Chinese American Henry and Keiko, the only other non-white student at their school, seems a means of mutual safety and support in the face of ridicule and bullying by their white classmates and the kids in their own neighborhoods who feel betrayed by Henry's and Keiko's abandonment to the "other side." Henry and Keiko are 12 when they get together, so there is a "Romeo and Juliet" suggestion to their growing relationship. Henry is further isolated by his father's avid Chinese nationalism. Henry is forbidden to speak Chinese in the home -- his father wants for Henry to be American -- and yet his father determinedly follows the war in China and hates Japan for its ongoing onslaughts against China. He would hate to know about Henry's feelings for Keiko.

The story is told in two time periods -- during Henry's childhood, and then 40 years later when the old Panama Hotel is purchased by a developer who wants to restore it to its original Japanese splendor. Henry sees a news report that mountains of abandoned goods have been discovered in the basement of the hotel, left behind when local Japanese-American residents were taken away to relocation camps. And he remembers Keiko. Henry's wife Ethel had died just 6 months before this. His son is a college student who thinks of Henry as old-fashioned, unromantic, and prejudiced.

I think that the book lost its punch and degraded into a Nicholas Sparks-like romance about halfway through. The historical stage has been set - we know what's happening with the war and with the major characters, and all that's left is for them to get back together. Or not, to the tune of moaning violins. So - although I liked the premise, the execution of this story was not strong. So - only 2 1/2 out of 4 stars.