From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

The book is written for and marketed to adults, but it reads very much like a children’s fairytale. It’s a frame narrative of sorts: we open with the (unnamed) protagonist visiting his hometown for a funeral (we never know whose). He’s drawn towards the site of his childhood home, though the house itself no longer stands, and finds himself wandering down the lane to the Hempstock Farm, where he had what might possibly have been the greatest, most terrifying adventure of his young life. The narrator speaks briefly with a woman he initially assumes is Lettie’s mother (Lettie being his childhood friend, the one who got him into said adventure), and then goes into an extended flashback of when he was seven years old, and met Lettie Hempstock, and all of the trouble that soon followed. We do eventually return to the present day farm (view spoiler)[where it turns out he’s been speaking, not to Lettie’s mother, but her grandmother...and I’m unclear on whether or not there are in fact 3 separate Hempstock women in actuality. I feel like Gaiman hints that there’s only this one woman, and the others are like...facets? of her? Something. There are multiple mentions of the narrator thinking he sees two of them, and then realizing there’s only one, and Old Mrs. Hempstock actually says at the end that “It’s just me...It’s only ever just me.” (hide spoiler)] The majority of the book, however, comes from the perspective of the 7-year-old narrator.

I actually enjoyed the narrator’s voice -- it’s simple but direct. He views the world in the way only a child can -- he’s both certain of his own immortality and terrified of death...which is an abstract concept at best. He loves escaping into books, preferring them over people and reality. I loved the scenes of him retreating into book worlds when things got too intense...Gaiman is able to emphasize the books’ importance and the value of escape without beating the audience over the head with the significance. Anyway. The narrator takes a very matter-of-fact approach to telling his story. When he was seven, an opal miner came to board at his family’s house (and ran over his new kitten when he arrived! Seriously, I hate dead animal stories, and a dead cat on page 7 was nearly enough to make me put this down! As it was, I had to stop for a minute and hug my dog). Not long after, the man committed suicide in the family’s car. When the narrator and his father discover this, and the police get involved, Lettie Hempstock shows up and offers to take the narrator back to her house while his father deals with the police. Lettie lives with her mother and grandmother, and the three of them clearly have some sort of supernatural power. The narrator never directly asks if they are witches, but when he asks Lettie later if she’s going to do a spell to get rid of Ursula, she scoffs. I kind of like that we never truly learn what the deal is with the Hempstocks. In some novels, this kind of omission feels like lazy storytelling, but here it seems organic. The narrator is seven, that age when you’re just on the cusp of not believing in the impossible anymore...he’s still young enough to want there to be magic in the world, but becoming skeptical enough not to ask about it, for fear of hearing that it’s not true. And the adult version of the narrator is understandably muddled about the events. I like that Gaiman never fully settles on an explanation -- the adult narrator remembers Lettie having moved to Australia, but spending some time with Old Mrs. Hempstock seems to bring back some of his memories of what actually (?) happened...or did it? Was any of it real? There’s a clear theme here of getting older and losing that ability to believe (I feel like this is a plot point of The Night Circus as well, isn’t it? Didn’t they have to get Bailey while he was young?), and maybe all of us had magic in our childhood, but our adult minds talked us out of the memories.

Like I said, the story is simple -- after the opal miner’s death, there’s essentially an evil spirit haunting the narrator’s family, in the form of new nanny Ursula, who everyone loves but the narrator, because he sees through her and can tell what she really is. It’s an experience I’m sure many people had as a kid, or have seen their own children have -- sometimes people feel “evil,” and generally it’s for no good reason. And of course we’ve all had the feeling that mom, or dad, or older siblings, or the babysitter were secretly trying to make us miserable. But Gaiman taps into that awful childhood fear...what if the adults are actually out to get you, and no one believes you? Ursula’s cruelty is hard to read, since the narrator is so innocent (and, we know, not actually doing anything wrong!), and the fact that she’s able to turn his father against him...it’s rough.

Ultimately, this reads like a fairy tale for adults. Which means I’m not sure what its true audience should be. I feel like a lot of people would be turned off by the simplicity of the story, but I’m not convinced that my students would enjoy it either...they might find it “boring” and complain that “nothing actually happens”. I’m forever on the hunt for a good 7th grade read-aloud, however, and I’m thinking I might just give this one a shot next year. It’s an easy read, and it’s not terribly long -- that’s usually the issue with finding something for read aloud: everything that’s decent is too long. This is my first experience with Gaiman’s writing, and I feel like this could be a good introduction to him. I’m vaguely familiar with some of his other work...which I’ve mostly avoided because a lot of it is graphic novels, which I lack the focus to read! I’ve had The Graveyard Book on my shelf for years, and it’s quite popular, but I’ve never had a chance to read it. I think I’m coming down on the positive here, mostly because this reminded me fondly of several other books I love: particularly The Night Circus (how fitting that there’s a blurb from Erin Morgenstern on the back!) and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. It has the same sort of slow-moving plot as Miss Peregrine’s, and it just evoke the same sort of feeling as The Night Circus...the hints that there’s more magic in the world than we realize, and sometimes it’s dangerous. The Hempstock women also reminded me of Blue’s assortment of aunts in The Raven Boys, but I feel like that’s mostly because I just read it and can’t stop thinking about it! I like it when books remind me of other books I love, and it’s not in a derivative “Dear God, I’ve read this all before and I’m so bored make it stop” sort of way (Ahem, The Testing).