Hill House

 I've been on a bit of a Shirley Jackson journey lately, mostly because I'm teaching We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the context of Jackson's female gothic. Also, I'm a sucker for anything New England gothic having written my own nonfiction volume on the history of Danvers State Hospital. I'm currently watching the 1999 version of The Haunting and hoping to finish the Netflix version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle with the kids on Monday as their semester ends Thursday. Because of the trials and tribulations of remote learning, we haven't been able to go quite as deep as I hoped.

Despite all the COVID restrictions and the fact that I haven't left my house since...well...last March, our library has begun doing curbside pickup and it's become something of an addiction for me so this week I picked up Susan Scarf Merrell's Shirley, a novelized imagining of Shirley's life told from the point of view of their young houseguest, Rose, whose professor husband has accepted a position working with Shirley's husband Stanley at Bennington College. 

I really, truly wanted so much more out of this book which was adapted to film in early 2020 starring Elizabeth Moss as Shirley. The movie was exceptionally well done but the book itself was equally disappointing. I had a hard time buying the fictional Shirley. While I clearly never met her, I've read enough about her and enough written by her to have a solid idea of what Shirley Jackson might have been like. In this novel, she's painfully unlikeable and very much a slave to domestic life. Where she did indeed wind up trapped in domesticity, she did not sit back and accept her lot. She rebelled in her writing and against her husband. Instead, this book portrays her as a woman who has given up, given in to her husband's proclivities for cheating with his students. The narrator of the story, Rose, is equally difficult to empathize with. She idolizes Shirley, which of course is understandable, but she also lets Shirley bully her and push her around. When Rose finally makes an attempt at writing something of her own, Shirley chastizes her and essentially tells her that writing is her sin, her calling-- not Rose's. 

I'll admit that I found myself simply skimming a good deal of the book. There was too much tell without much show and the endless narration became tedious and did very little to move the plot (of which there wasn't much) along to a satisfying end. Overall, a bit of a disappointment. I think I'll stick to reading Shirley herself!

SURPRISE! A book review!

 Thanks to the global pandemic I'm working from home so I don't have many educational adventures to draw from to revive this blog. Instead, I've got some book reviews to share because let's be real, I've had a lot of reading time on my hands. So what do you say? Ready for an onslaught of my unsolicited opinion?

Let's talk Every Last Fear, an ARC I was excited to request from NetGalley. (If you're a reader/reviewer and don't already have a NetGalley account, be sure to sign up!)

So, the book. 

Matt Pine has been living with his brother's incarceration for years. Older brother Danny was convicted of murdering his girlfriend after an argument at a house party. Matt's family had a hard enough time dealing with his incarceration on their own until the Adlers got involved, a husband and wife director duo who created a documentary for Netflix about Danny's case, a film that proclaimed his innocence and portrayed their hometown as a cesspool of hicks marching around with pitchforks and torches. The Pines-- Liv, Evan, Maggie, Tommy, and Matt- were forced to relocate and their lives were upended by Danny's case.

Now a film student at NYU, Matt learns even more devastating news: the rest of his family, having taken a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Mexico, has been brutally murdered. With the help of FBI Special Agent Keller, Matt tries to unravel his family's last days, figuring out why they went to Mexico in the first place and, more importantly, why they became the target of this heinous crime that was clearly staged to look like an accident.

This book is a nail biter. I stayed up late trying to finish it because I could not put it down and was absolutely not prepared for the twists and turns. I'm generally able to figure out who the real perpetrator is early on in a novel but this book kept me guessing until the very end. The dialogue was realistic, every character drawn out and drawn well, even those who were eliminated in the very first line of the book. No character was expendable; each one played a part and no one was introduced just to have more names on the page. If you like cookie-cutter, cozy mysteries this is not the book for you!