| $@%&! level: Low “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Medium-Low Back Cover: “She doesn't know who she is, and doesn't know why she's invisibly floating through the buildings and grounds of a half-remembered boarding school. Then, to her horror, she encounters the ancient evil that four peculiar sisters have unwittingly woken—and learns she is their only hope against a deadly danger.” |
One of the things I really enjoyed is the fact that the main character, the ghost, literally spends half the book trying to figure out who she is. She starts out with no memory at all, aside from the conviction that there’s been some kind of accident, and then gradually picks things up, remembering them as they’re presented to her. That adds an extra dollop of suspense that gets way more stretched out than I was expecting. Because not only doesn’t she know who she is, she doesn’t know what happened to her. Is she dead? Is she the result of some kind of experiment or spell? And then when she finally does remember what happened to her, she still doesn’t know which of the four sisters is her, and has to use the process of elimination! That’s actually an excellent technique for holding the reader’s interest, although after a while I got a little frustrated with it.
Another excellent aspect is the use of description. She has to do a lot of description, because the ghost is seeing everything for the first time, but at the same time remembering it, so that you get that strange double perception of combining distant memories and present changes. That really does require a lot of description to get across. And also, the description is necessary because this may be a highly unusual home and group of people, but it’s still just four girls living in their family home. It takes a good long time for the actual story to kick in. In the meantime, you get a really clear character development and understanding of all the things that are so horrendously wrong with the way these children are being raised. I have no doubt that they behave so badly just in an effort to get their parents to pay attention to them in any way at all.
Eventually, the story does kick in properly, and that’s when things get even more weird. I’m never quite sure if the time travelling actually does anything, or if it’s a matter of things having already happened and staying happened. That makes the final resolution both satisfying and a little bit anticlimactic. While the evil menacing the ghost is excellently creepy, there’s a question in my mind about what would have actually happened if the sisters hadn’t gone to all those great lengths. Would it have been a tragic ending, or was Monigan just playing with them and things would have turned out just about the same?