All posts tagged: The Invited

Who Invited You?

Jennifer McMahon’s The Invited wasn’t bad but it wasn’t scary either. I think this narrative that “you shouldn’t really fear ghosts; it’s your neighbors you should be scared of” is more than played out. The focus of the book quickly shifts from one of hauntings and ghostly presences to that of a seemingly cute town hiding more than its fair share of dirty secrets. That is a shame because the creepy wind was quickly taken out of the sails of this book.  I liked the back and forth story telling between the two main characters because the shifting perspective made things move quickly and instilled some much needed suspense. The characters are a bit one note and almost secondary to pushing the storyline along. The most interesting characters are the ghosts, and we hardly get to know them. (Inexplicably one chapter is written in first person, in contradistinction to the rest of the book, and it actually makes me mad.) It admittedly gets pretty fun at the end leading up to the predictable “twist.” As …

RSVP: Maybe?

Let me start by saying that Jennifer McMahon’s earlier book The Winter People is one of my favorite books. And I’ll probably read anything she writes from now on. But it also means I come into her books with fairly high expectations. I was excited to add The Invited to our 2020 Bookly list, and felt like it couldn’t be a better fit for our October selection. And I wasn’t totally wrong! Haha. It was a solid ghost story set in Maine during late summer and early fall, so it was a great time to pick this one up. But overall, for me, it wasn’t a home run. Don’t worry, I’ll share my thoughts without any spoilers… I struggled with the main character. She fell a little flat for me, and I never quite hooked into any of her motivations. It’s not giving anything away to say she spends most of the story fixated on local historical artifacts that tie into the greater mystery. And to me this fixation seemed like a bit of a …

October Book

At The Bookly Club we read according to the season (more on that here). And what does fall put you in the mood for? For us it’s the perfect time to read something good and scary. We know, we know this year’s been scary enough! We’re definitely not in the mood for anything apocalyptic right now. BUT this October we’ve picked a book that’s a play on the classic haunted house story. And we think it’s just right time for curling up with a good book as the leaves change and the temperatures fall. The Invited by Jennifer McMahon is a story about Nate and Helen; a young couple who decide to leave suburban life for a more rural setting on forty acres of land in the country. They plan to build their dream home together. As Helen finds inspiration through found objects in the local area—a beam from an old schoolroom, bricks from a mill, a mantel from a farmhouse—she becomes infatuated with the area’s dark history. The stories of Hattie Breckenridge, a local …