The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfeld

What a great book. I really enjoyed reading this story about a young journalist who is asked by a dying author to write her biography. The book jacket accurately describes the book as "...a tale of Gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire."

The style of the book took some getting used to. It was written in an old-fashioned tone, more like what I would expect from a book written in the 19th century. The narrator is a young woman, ostensibly in modern-day Enlgand, but many of her comments and her lifestyle suggest an older time. Perhaps if I had read more Austin or Bronte it would be humorously familiar. For example, here she describes her return to the author's mansion:

"When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, explosing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the glloom. "Blasted weather," she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether."

There is a lot in the book for book-lovers specifically. Not only is the main character the daughter of a bookseller and herself a bibliophile, but she is interviewing an author, and several pivotal scenes occur in libraries. At one point she runs a fever and faints, and a doctor is brought in. He suspects that her ailments are in her head. "I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course."

The book is a mystery, and a good one. There are several great twists, and enough clues that the reader could play along if desired. But it's also a great novel. There are wonderful moments of symbolism, plot, and good thick characters. The charaters form a wonderful canvas where Setterfeld gives us parallels and comparisons between them throughout the book. Each character individually taken is complex and compelling, but the real beauty is each of the characters taken in contrast to the others. In some cases it's governess/doctor or twin/twin or mother/daughter or lover/lover, but the pairs are amazingly effective in further elucidating the characters.

I often felt spooked and chilly reading it, as if it were raining outside, which in the book it often was. Setterfield created what I would describe as several layers of a fairytale world, and I fell right into it.