The Housekeeper, by Melanie Wallace
If you liked Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and cannot wait for his next novel to appear, allow me to I recommend The Housekeeper, by Melanie Wallace. Both books demonstrate the power of pitch-perfect prose to make bleak stories gripping. The sense of doom that hangs over Cold Mountain comes, of course, from the Civil War; in The Housekeeper, it is a byproduct, as it were, of poverty and isolation. The surest way to repel you would be to outline Ms Wallace's story, or even to sketch its point of departure. That is something that only she can do, and she has done it with extraordinary skill. Here's something from the dust jacket:
With an unforgettable case of characters and gorgeous, piercing prose, The Housekeeper is at once a poetic meditation on landscape and a page-turning thriller.
True statements, I can attest.
Continue reading about The Housekeeper at Portico.
