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mh_books 's review for:
The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
When I was a child (about 10/11 I think) I bought a copy of Jane Eyre for 2p in a sale of work. All the other books were about 50p. So it was cheap even then. The reason? It was in really bad condition, some child had scribbled on most of the pages and others were torn out. Still, I had seen an adaption of Jane Eyre on TV and I was fascinated with the story of the unwanted Jane. I made a good choice as I loved that book, I read it again and again and had to make up what happened on the missing pages, and where the child’s scribbles were too dense to make out the text.
Somehow I think that if I had a similar bad copy of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield I would have gone to the same efforts to read it. Maybe it’s because Jane Eyre itself is referenced in the book, mostly though I believe it is because it is a well-crafted tale, that lets the reader fall into a story that is larger than life as all good stories should be.
The premise of the book is about a Jayne Eyreish character called Margaret, she has been asked by letter to write a biography of a famous and popular author Vida Winter (great name) who lives in a gothic manor in the moors no less. Vida Winter is most famous for her first book thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, but it only had twelve tales. What happened to the thirteenth tale? The world and its dog would like to know. Vida Winter has told journalists dozens of stories about her life and childhood, each one more outlandish than the next and not one of them true. Is the thirteenth tale that everyone thirsts for her life story?
There is a tale within the tale about the Angelfield family living in their own gothic house, the beautiful and willful Isabelle, Charlie her ill-fated brother, Isabelle’s odd twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a very practical governess, a very naive doctor, a garden and a fire that will have devastating consequence.
Really this tale is so over the top it should not work, the fact that it does makes it worth every one of its five stars.
Forgot to say. I read this for the October 2016 read with the Gothic Literature Group on Goodreads.
Somehow I think that if I had a similar bad copy of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield I would have gone to the same efforts to read it. Maybe it’s because Jane Eyre itself is referenced in the book, mostly though I believe it is because it is a well-crafted tale, that lets the reader fall into a story that is larger than life as all good stories should be.
The premise of the book is about a Jayne Eyreish character called Margaret, she has been asked by letter to write a biography of a famous and popular author Vida Winter (great name) who lives in a gothic manor in the moors no less. Vida Winter is most famous for her first book thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, but it only had twelve tales. What happened to the thirteenth tale? The world and its dog would like to know. Vida Winter has told journalists dozens of stories about her life and childhood, each one more outlandish than the next and not one of them true. Is the thirteenth tale that everyone thirsts for her life story?
There is a tale within the tale about the Angelfield family living in their own gothic house, the beautiful and willful Isabelle, Charlie her ill-fated brother, Isabelle’s odd twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a very practical governess, a very naive doctor, a garden and a fire that will have devastating consequence.
Really this tale is so over the top it should not work, the fact that it does makes it worth every one of its five stars.
Forgot to say. I read this for the October 2016 read with the Gothic Literature Group on Goodreads.