Cat Winters

"Oh you silly naive men." I shook my weary head and genuinely pitied their ignorance. "You've clearly never been a sixteen-year old girl in the fall of 1918."

Another fascinating and eerily set story based in the time of the Spanish Flu. It's also starts in Oregon (there are a lot of references to her memories of Oregon) as a young Mary is shipped to California from her Oregon home in order to try to save her from the flu and the dilemma her father is in.

And although I found the historical parts really interesting and Mary a great main character, I was disappointed that I felt this was more historical and less gothic tale.… (more)

I thought this book was at its strongest when it described how awful 1918 must have been to live through: The way people rejected touching or doused themselves in home remedies; The image of kids playing on coffins; Plague and death as almost living beings.

I liked the idea of putting a scientific protagonist into a gothic romance, but Mary Shelley was not really practical or scientific, and it turned too gothic too quickly for me.

I would recommend this to teens who like Jennifer Donnelly or Stephenie Meyer.… (more)

Slow in the beginning, but it picks up quite a bit of speed. What was refreshing in the audiobook (and the print version, I suppose, since some of it is the language) is that the characters have modern relevance--there is no false 1920s affect--they are just people living their lives. Rebecca and Michael, for example, could easily be a twenty-first century pair of exes. Voiced by Xe Sands, with only a bit of artifice when it came to the male voices, the story traces the journey(s) of Alice Lind, a young itinerant child psychologist whose assigned to administer psychological tests to school children. In the small coastal town of Gordon Bay, Oregon, she encounters seven-year-old Janie O'Daire, a math genius who holds secrets and truths that force Alice to confront her own assumptions and beliefs.

Certainly it is a haunting tale, and the subtext of Alice's challenges as a woman in male-dominated field sometimes comes crashing through without subtlety, but it does help shape her character. I found some of the descriptive detail superfluous, ranging from an obsession with the weather to a rather graphic encounter in a hotel room, made tedious because I didn't much care for either character enough to be privy to their intimacy.

That the ending is unresolved and we are left wondering what the future holds was actually refreshing. There are a few annoyances around the name "Nel" and at least one of the possibilities doesn't even seem to be an intentional red herring (Eleanor - "Nell"). That's not really a spoiler. There's also an exponential increase in speed in the last quarter of the book, which I found a bit aggravating. Having invested so much in Alice, her story moved far too quickly for me once Janie's was "settled."… (more)