It is a kind of ghost story, but a rather boring one.

Book is travelling to another bookcrosser. I hope she likes it better than I did!

Thanks BookCrosser. It arrived last week. Too much books, I know the problem ;) Wanted to offer you something in return though. Thanks for sending and Merry Christmas ( in advance)!

I finished it this week and found it interesting, suspenseful and very good to read. However, if I would have read it faster, I'm certain it would have frightened me a lot more. Anyway, it was good!

Picked up in Castricum.

Excellent! Gobbled it up in 2 days.

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Taken from the book table in Castricum. I still haven't read any of Sarah Waters' books. Maybe this will be the first.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book strongly reminded me of Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, with Dr Faraday as the outsider, overawed by the house and the family who are out of his league, looking back on a period that has passed, trying to understand what went wrong. There are also echoes of Jane Eyre, with a ‘gothic’ house, strange goings on in the attic and many of the melodramatic incidents. Given those are two of my favourite books, you could hazard a guess that The Little Stranger was perfect for me, keeping me away from the things I should have been doing, cutting into my sleeping time, spooking me, then making me exercise self-restraint so that I didn’t gulp it down as fast as physically possible. It was a close call, though.

Even though it was drawn out, the story was riveting, creepy but not horrific. One of the quotes on the back cover says “You'll want to sleep with the light on”, so one evening, when the tension was rising, I decided to go to bed instead of reading further, before I scared myself silly. It was hardly necessary, however. Since the story is told at a distance by a narrator, Dr Faraday, we can only guess at what other characters truly saw or believed. Everything is interpreted through his observations and assumptions. Unlike one of Steven King’s horror novels, there are no descriptions of whatever it is that is causing all the trouble. Is it a ghost, a malevolent energy, a ‘little stranger’? Or is it a case of restricted mass hysteria, overactive imaginations, hallucinations or inherent mental issues? Like Dr Faraday, we can never be entirely certain.

For the Bridges Book Club book swap.
Edit:

This book has been released as part of the following BookCrossing challenges:
- The Ultimate Challenge - read and release books, with extra points for a monthly theme
- Reduce Mount TBR (To Be Read) - read and release books on the TBR list since before the end of the previous year.