The Tale of Halcyon Crane

The point of the Bookshelf posts is to organize my thoughts on this year’s reading, and keep a log of books I have read. These aren't reviews meant to tear apart books otherwise we could be here all day. I read for pleasure and sometimes I enjoy crap writing. I almost always finish what I'm reading. I don't include books I've dropped in my book total regardless of how much of it I read. If it's particularly bad, I will write about it.

My goal this year is to average one book per month with a total of 12 books for the year. My local library has been a fantastic place to bring the boys and they have helped rekindle my love of reading. At the writing of this post I am at 7/12 books. I really got started in  April.

Note: I always hyperlink the title to its Good Reads page.

The Tale of Halcyon Crane

Wendy Webb

The Tale of Halcyon Crane is Wendy Webb’s first published novel, and the second of her works my librarian, Susan, suggested to me when I asked for gothic/witchcraft. The first work she had suggested was in more of a diary entry style and I don’t personally enjoy that style so I found myself returning it to Susan before I was a quarter through. The back of this book looked more promising.

“When a mysterious letter lands in Hallie James’s mailbox, her life is upended. Hallie was raised by her loving father, having been told her mother died in a fire decades earlier. But it turns out her mother, Madlyn, was alive until very recently. Why would Hallie’s father have taken her away from Madlyn? What really happened to her family 30 years ago?

In search of answers, Hallie travels to the place her mother lived, a remote island in the middle of the Great Lakes. Most of the stiff islanders are unwelcoming, and she soon realizes her family’s dark secrets are enmeshed in the history of this strange community. And then there’s the grand Victorian house bequeathed to her - maybe it’s the eerie atmosphere or maybe it’s the prim, elderly maid who used to work for her mother, but Hallie just can’t shake the feeling that strange things are starting to happen…”

As a lover of mystery and spooky stories, this sounded right up my alley. Unfortunately the book didn’t deliver these themes as well as I had hoped. In my opinion, this book is really a collection of short stories brought together by an underdeveloped modern day story. The short stories of Hallie’s family I found to be well told and I was longing to get back to those stories and ended up skim reading over parts of the present. Hallie herself is not an interesting character. Other than starting the book by traveling to an unknown village she doesn’t do anything on her own accord. The one time she tries to she is impeded by local law enforcement, and then, “off screen”, her love interest manages to do what she had intended.

Her love interest is introduced quickly and feels high school and unnecessary to the plot of the story. You could maybe believe that they fell in love so quickly because they had known each other as children, but other things about Hallie’s past make that hard for me to believe. She doesn’t remember him, she had been previously married,seems to maintain a good relationship with her ex-husband, and her inner monologue leads you to believe she’s very guarded and afraid to love again. This is all completely dismissed after one date.

The dating takes over quite a bit of the present story. Where I thought there would be some investigative work on Hallie’s part, she was instead sipping wine or coffee with the boys in town. It’s Iris, the spooky housemaid, who is the driving force of this novel. From early on Hallie hints at Iris being extremely old and maybe not entirely human. When Iris has her big reveal at the end of the book you’re left unsurprised because the foreshadowing from Hallie is so aggressive. This defeats the purpose of foreshadowing.

I was reading some reviews of this book on Good Reads after I had finished with it and someone had mentioned that Wendy Webb normally wrote non-fiction. After a brief search, I found that Webb is a journalist. I can see this in the book. The stories Iris weaves are given to Hallie as an account of facts. They are good short stories that are let down by a boring main character. Hallie’s scenes kill all the spookiness the book is trying to develop.

This isn’t a horrible book. The word choice and grammar are there, it’s not poorly written, it’s just poorly developed and amateur. I am interested in reading one of Webb’s newer novels to see if her storytelling has improved over the years.