Reviews with content warning for Grief - Тайна замка Роксфорд-Холл

“In my second year at Miss Hale’s, I won a prize for recitation: a book of Greek myths with wonderful pictures. The stories I liked best were those of Theseus and Ariadne, Orpheus and Eurydice, and especially Persephone in the Underworld. Anything to do with the Underworld fascinated me—I used to imagine that it was just under the kitchen floor, and that I would find steps going down to it if I were only strong enough to lift up one of the flagstones.”

TITLE—The Séance

AUTHOR—John Harwood

PUBLISHED—2008

GENRE—historical fiction

SETTING—Victorian England

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Victorian culture & beliefs, Spiritualism, ghosts, death, grief, Romanticism, artistry, mental illness, gaslighting & “Force of Belief”, patriarchal oppression, mystery

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—such an interesting, very loose retelling of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White!

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Ancient houses, it has always seemed to me, are like Leyden jars, quietly accumulating the influences of the past…”

Wow. That book was *fun*! I could not stop reading it and when I *had* to stop reading it to go to work I thought about it the whole day and could not wait to get home and read it. 😂

There are a ton of things to love about this book but its real strength lies in its treatment of the themes of misogyny and gaslighting as major tools in the systemic and societal oppression of women in the Victorian era (/history…). The use of the “Force of Belief” as the main power behind the villain was a great callback to Collins’s use of the same for his villain in The Woman in White (of which The Seance did read at times as a loose retelling).

But there’s so much more from the absolutely chilling gothic atmosphere that clings to the pages of this book like the fogs of Monk’s Wood itself to the intricate and elaborate ins and outs of a plot that had me literally falling off the edge of my seat in my eagerness to read the next page as quickly as possible. 😂 And the treatment and discussion of Spiritualism was also very interesting and well done.

The only thing is that I feel like the build up was so good that I wanted there to be like ONE more little twist at the end or something to give it maybe a more ambiguous ending (à la Purcell, perhaps?) but idk. Harwood covered all of his themes and fired all of his guns so all in all a fantastic reimagining of the classic Gothic novel. I think it’s safe to say that John Harwood “got the assignment”. 😚👌🏻

“It is all very well for you, Mr. Raphael, who are clever and confident and at home in the world, but for those like my mother, who are simply crushed by the weight of grief, why deprive them of the comfort a séance can bring?”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

TW // grief, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, gaslighting (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell
The Shape of Darkness, by Laura Purcell
The Ghost Writer, by John Harwood—TBR
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
The Prestige (2006 film)

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3.5

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