Review:
When Maggie Holt was five, she and her parents spent 20 days in Baneberry Hall before they suddenly left the place and never went back. Maggie's father wrote a book about their experience, House of Horrors, that has haunted her her whole life, coloring her relationships and memories. Maggie can't remember her time at Baneberry Hall, doesn't personally believe in ghosts, and is convinced that her father lied about the haunting because their family needed money. However, neither of her parents would ever give her a straight answer about what really happened there.
When her father dies of cancer, Maggie discovers that one of the things he's left her is Baneberry Hall, which she hadn't realized he still owned. Maggie plans to renovate the place and sell it after figuring out as much of the truth as she can.
This reminded me strongly of Netflix's adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House: family drama, disagreements about what really happened years ago and complicated feelings about the way everytone dealt with it, alternating between scenes in the present day and past, home renovation, etc. As a result, this didn't feel very original, but it was different enough to both keep my attention and not feel like a copy. The ending, in particular, was a wild ride that went in a very different direction than my "this feels like that Netflix show" brain expected it to go. I ended up reading this entire book in only a day.
Baneberry Hall was a big place with a bit of a dark history, so it was both believable that others would think it was haunted and that someone could convince others that it was haunted. The question Maggie really had to answer and that she was uncomfortable facing wasn't just "What really happened during those 20 days?" but also "How much of what my father wrote was the truth?" She figured her father must have lied because 1) ghosts weren't real and 2) if she had really seen ghosts like "Mister Shadow" and "Miss Pennyface" the way his book said she had, she would have remembered at least some of it. The more things she discovered that matched what others knew about the place and her family's time in it, the more uncertain she became.
Do you have stories of your childhood that you don't really remember but that you've heard others talk about so often that you've built something almost like a memory based on them? That, unfortunately, was part of what Maggie was dealing with. She had trouble separating true memories from the things her father had written about that she'd read so many times before. It was a convenient way to conceal the truth from readers, but it was also something I was willing to believe and go along with.
Overall, I enjoyed this. The atmosphere and ghostly aspects were nicely creepy, and even though the ending was a bit much, I had fun with it. I'm glad things didn't turn out quite the way they initially seemed they would, but at the same time, the way some of the characters behaved was kind of frustrating. Also, thinking about it now, while it makes sense that Maggie's father would keep Baneberry Hall, it doesn't make sense that he'd give it to her after his death.
No comments:
Post a Comment