Recent reading

[troisoiseaux]

Read Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand, which was completely bananas, not least because I'd picked it up expecting a fairly straightforward murder mystery and found myself reading a convoluted gothic thriller instead. A journalist turned advice columnist receives a series of letters from a girl who appears to be living out the plot of a Brontë novel; when she decides to drop in on her pen pal, she finds the isolated manor exactly as described— but everyone inside denies all knowledge of the girl! This being super mysterious, she promptly fakes a broken ankle to get herself reluctantly invited to stay overnight and begins to investigate. It's less of a Whodunnit than a Had I But Known, to borrow the phrase from this review, with so many plot twists and red herrings and revelations that raise more questions than answers.

Comments

[ermingarden]

Wow, Cat and Mouse sounds wild!

[troisoiseaux]

The ultimate ending would be a wild if predictable twist in any straightforward murder mystery, but by the time I'd gotten through everything else it was like, yeah, this may as well happen.

I will say that most of the plot twists were well-set-up— not in the sense that I saw them coming, exactly, but once they were revealed, it made me think back to seemingly random information given earlier in the book, like, ohhh, I see what she did there.

[osprey_archer]

Was it bananas in a good way or bananas in a "I can't stop reading because now I have to know what happens, but I wish I hadn't started!" way?

[troisoiseaux]

Bananas in a fairly neutral, "this sure was An Experience" way, I'd say? There was some stuff I felt a bit :/ about, but I found one of the twists really clever, so it sort of balanced out in the wash.