The Mother-Daughter Book Club #5—The Saturday Night Ghost Club, Wuthering Heights, O Caledonia

My daughters (the two who live close) and I have a little book club. We love to read, but we also love an extra opportunity to get together to eat and drink. If you’d like to catch up on what we’ve read, here are the links to the other Mother-Daughter Book Club posts:

The Mother-Daugher Book Club #1: The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, After Dark by Haruki Murakami
The Mother-Daughter Book Club #2: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Mother-Daughter Book Club #3: Foe and I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Ian Reid
The Mother-Daughter Book Club #4: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

We picked this because we were looking for something seasonal, spooky light. And it seemed to lean literary (we love real candy, but avoid reading-candy for book club). Set in the 80s, the protagonist is a twelve-year-old kid (this isn’t a middle-grade book) whose eccentric uncle leads him and a couple of friends around on bicycles at night for scary adventures. That’s the apparent subject. The deeper subject has to do with his uncle’s past, which also means his parents’ pasts.

The author was smart in making this a retrospective—we get the character’s adult self before he begins telling the story of his childhood. This allows him to incorporate the voice of innocence (the child) with the voice of wisdom (the adult), so that we get a richer perspective on the events.

My girls gave this one 3 stars. They just didn’t find the plot that interesting. At least that’s what they said. I suspect the real reason they didn’t connect with it because they are not GenX! Running around a small town at night looking for (innocent) mischief is a part of my roots. The vibe comparisons to Stranger Things and Stand by Me are fair. I thought it had the coming-of-age achiness of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. 4 stars from me.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

We hadn’t read it, we hadn’t seen the movies. We were not prepared. We were under the impression that this was a love story. I mean, the trailer for the Wuthering Heights movie says this is the “Greatest Love Story of All Time.” People get whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same tattoos. What in the actual world? I love a dark narrative and some good emotional savagery, but somebody somewhere had done some false advertising.

I rather disliked much of this book. I started out at 2 stars and this is why (it’s my fault, really): First, that I was expecting a love story and instead got the pathologically obsessive, abusive, and insufferable “relationship” that is Catherine-and-Heathcliff was a disappointment, to say the least. Also, my real failing is that I listened to the audio book, and the narrator screeched, bellowed, and whined the entire thing. I assume this would have been dialed down had I been reading it with my eyeballs. However, the structure of the novel, told second and third-hand through the perspective of a housekeeper and houseguest was so interesting. The POV I loved, so I ended up at 3 stars.

Josie liked it the best, giving it 3.5 stars for the entertaining melodrama. Evie was a 3. And with that, we’ll be excited to go see the Valentine’s Day weekend (lol) release of the new movie starring Margot Robbie (I do love her).

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

This is a short novel with a dramatic beginning—our heroine, in her Scottish Highlands home, is found at the bottom of a great stone staircase, dead. The book then goes back in time and we learn about the girl and what happened to her. It’s gothic, witty, and weird, reminiscent of Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

The setup is plotty but the book, surprisingly, isn’t. There are some dramatic happenings, but to me, the book reads more like an atmospheric character sketch than the whodunit I was expecting. My girls were bummed about the lack of story propulsion—Josie gave it 3 stars and Evie gave it 2.5 (nuts!).

I can’t give this book fewer than 4 stars. The prose, people. The prose. It’s not flowery, not fancy—it’s precise and original. The observations are insightful and hilarious. Maybe it’s that I read this book on a beautiful white sand beach with a piña colada in hand. But likely not, since Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet author) wrote this in her introduction to the book—“I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O Caledonia as her favorite book.”