This is the first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It establishes the narrator and tells us a good bit about her.
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
I think this type of book is best experienced when you know little about it, and I enjoyed going into it that way. Although I might have read it sooner if I had read more reviews. Thus my description and comments will be brief.
As this short novel starts, Mary Katherine (also known as Merricat) lives with her older sister, Constance, and her Uncle Julian in a very large but run down house. The reader learns shortly that everyone else in the family died from poisoning when eating a meal. For several years after the poisoning, Merricat was the only one who left the house. She would walk to the nearby village twice a week to do the shopping and get books from the library. Constance never left the house, and Uncle Julian was confined to a wheel chair.
My goal in reading this book was to read a Gothic novel, since I don't go for that genre much, and to read more by Shirley Jackson. Up to now I have only read a few of her short stories.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. This story was not nearly as scary or tense as I expected it to be. There was a sense of foreboding and waiting for something horrible to happen.
I liked Merricat's narration, and the depiction of their lives before and after the rest of the family died. I liked the way the ending was handled. The beauty of the story was in the way Jackson very slowly reveals small bits of the plot.
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Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006 (orig. pub. 1962).
Length: 146 pages
Format: Trade Paperback
Setting: Vermont, US
Genre: Gothic, Classic
Source: I purchased this book in 2017.
2 comments:
I completely agree with you, Tracy, about going into this book with very little background information. It's best appreciated like that, I think. And yes, Jackson was so good at slowly revealing the characters and pieces of the plot. I think that adds suspense to the story. And what an interesting narrator!
1) Why are the baddies always named Constance?
2) Five of my nieces/nephews attended Merricat's Castle School for preschool. I have always wondered how the school got its name but on the few occasions I ran into the proprietors it was always too hectic to ask. But it seems so strange!
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