The Little Stranger

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Waters, Sarah	4-week checkout	Due 04-29-2024

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

This is Basically A Ghost Story submitted by Sara W on August 26, 2011, 8:05pm It's not a bad ghost story, but it takes an exceedingly long time to establish that it's just a ghost story. Even once I knew, I kept waiting for there to be something more. I wanted the doctor to turn out to be a horrendously unreliable narrator, or for the daughter to have been mad the whole time and up to insane tricks, or Betty the maid to be seeking vengeance for some age-old slight done to her family. But no. It's just a ghost story.

Great prose, less-great storyline submitted by terpsichore17 on June 21, 2022, 12:42pm Overall, this put me in mind of Downton Abbey as the setting for The Fall of the House of Usher. Beautiful prose; richly detailed descriptions of everything from the decaying structure of the house, to the stirrings of gossip in the neighborhood, to the tense way the Ayres act and react to whatever Phenomena are about.

Unreliable first-person narration keeps much of the mysterious action at a remove. That distance and his skepticism keep the story from getting too creepy, I suppose. It leaves one more alarmed by Faraday’s obsession with the house (which makes more sense at the outset than later, when it’s ravaged by fire/damp/cutting up the park for new development/broken things), his increasing paternalism, and his desperation to explain everything away with nerves/exhaustion.

Seeley as the mouthpiece of a medical man desperately trying to make the supernatural into a natural phenomenon…didn’t quite sell me, but I suppose it couldn’t have been anyone else.

I prefer my stories with less ambiguity at the end, but it certainly follows the preceding 460 pages in tone.