Paperback Castles

“We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.”

This book is so, so, so lovely and yet endlessly frustrating. It starts out as a deliciously creepy mystery with soft tones of childish defence mechanisms and simple escapism. The idea that Abe should be telling his stories as a way of coping with death, loss and tragedy is beautiful, sincere and believable. The subtle hints that there may hide something even darker beneath the thin layer of make-believe are disturbing. The first 100 pages of this book were everything I had imagined it to be; filled with strangeness and peculiarity.

The last 250 pages were, however, a mess. The book pulled itself in two opposite directions; what started out as a haunting mystery turned into a fantasy novel with odd elements of teen-romance. Plot holes started to appear, and confusion washed in over me in crashing waves. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to feel, or what the novel was trying to be. It was marketed as one thing and written as another.

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

The characters are poorly developed and the circumstances surrounding them are bleak. Riggs' writing is beautiful; but it never comes to life, it never draws you in completely. The passage I loved most in this book, was the prologue. Everything moved slowly downhill after that.