Book Review (or why the guests were uninvited...

Wow. I’m not even sure what to say about this book. I vascillated between hating it and being extremely amused by it. I can’t say I ever loved it.

I generally am very clear on how I feel about the characters in a book. Sometimes I am disgruntled to find that I don’t like a character that I think the author wants me to like. Except for Emerald, and perhaps Patience and Ernest, and of course Smudge, I heartily disliked the characters most of the time, but liked them on and off. But my suspicion is that this is exactly what the author wants me to feel.

Though the social mores of the main characters were disturbing (i.e. ignoring the train survivors in lieu of preparing for the party), I could understand (if not forgive) because of my love of Downton Abbey. The classes were the classes in post-Victoria n England, and these characters could not be any different, even though they were actually quite penniless.

I found the author’s writing style quite charming and quirky. The plot was bizarre, but funny – almost like a play. In fact, I could see making this into a play. The story of Smudge and the pony was hilarious. In fact, the intermingling of everything that was happening as the night ensued was really funny, and I could have actually whole-heartedly loved this book if it hadn’t been for the whole ghost thing that seemed to come out of nowhere and then be dismissed fairly off-handedly.

Charles was utterly despicable, but apparently quite charming and charismatic. I was initially morally affronted during the parlor game in which guests were to name something unique about one of the others, and I began squirming when it seemed to turn mean. How could they do this, I wondered. All of the sudden, a memory came crawling into my mind – something not even my two sisters know about and will be horrified to read.

When I was in junior high school, I went to the birthday party of one of my school friends, whose mother had a hair salon in their basement. Not surprisingly, BOYS crashed the party. Nothing good comes of an unsupervised gathering of junior high girls and boys. At some point, the boys decided it would be hilarious to write something on one of the girls’ foreheads using nail polish. Yours truly was the one selected. Now, most assuredly, some little voice in my head told me this was not a good idea; nevertheless, in an unending pursuit of popularity, I agreed to it. I was blindfolded, and one of the boys proceeded to use nail polish to write on my forehead. Upon removing the blindfold, I discovered the boy had hilariously written F*** on my face. Now whether nail polish remover was unavailable or we just didn’t think about it, the way we removed the polish was by using a brillo pad to scrape off the top layer of my skin, leaving a bright red mark across the top of my face.

The reason this memory came back is that it reminded me just how easily human nature allows us to do something that is profoundly wrong just to be accepted by others. That is what I saw happening during that parlor game. The guests all knew it was wrong, and yet they kept playing and, in fact, became quite mean. Interesting.

Once it was disclosed that Charles was a ghost, I realized that the others were ghosts as well, so the ending didn’t really come as a surprise.

I would definitely NOT recommend this book to others, though, as I said, I found the author’s writing to be quite funny, and the story to be really clever at times. Still, it says a lot that the best thing I can say about this book is that it was blessedly short.