Helpful Score: 5
Can not believe the bad reviews this book got. I really liked this book. Give me a haunted B&B, glass or mug of something and I would read all night. Not perfect, but the book is a delightful ghost story.
Helpful Score: 4
Take every (and I mean EVERY) cliche you can think of -- cultural, social, relationship, new age, yes all of them --, put them into one long book and you will have the text of The Tale of Halcyon Crane.
While the writer has good control of the concepts of plot and pacing, she really needs to work on character development, dialogue, and consistency. From the lack of all those things, I can only assume editors are no longer employed by Henry Holt publishers. There's no question this book, simply by the deletion of extraneous dialogue and totally useless scenes, could have been cut down to 220 pages. Of course, that would only serve to make the waste of your time in reading it much less.
Having read it, I would never recommend it to anyone for any reason. It has not an original thought in it and, as I said, feels like a "paste together" of all the rot floating around on Oprah and on Ghost Hunters.
While the writer has good control of the concepts of plot and pacing, she really needs to work on character development, dialogue, and consistency. From the lack of all those things, I can only assume editors are no longer employed by Henry Holt publishers. There's no question this book, simply by the deletion of extraneous dialogue and totally useless scenes, could have been cut down to 220 pages. Of course, that would only serve to make the waste of your time in reading it much less.
Having read it, I would never recommend it to anyone for any reason. It has not an original thought in it and, as I said, feels like a "paste together" of all the rot floating around on Oprah and on Ghost Hunters.
Helpful Score: 1
I thought this Gothic ghost story was very enjoyable. It was told in a very straight forward manner and didn't have a lot of surprises but it was fun to read nevertheless. The story is about Hallie James who is living outside Seattle...her father in a nursing home with Alzheimer's...and believing that her mother had died in a fire. She then receives a letter that turns her world upside down. She inherits a house on an island in the Great Lakes and it turns out that her mother who recently died had found out that Hallie was alive. Hallie goes to the island and finds out that her real name is Halcyon Crane and that the house she inherits has a bleak history with several untimely deaths and a possibly ghostly haunting. The housekeeper for the estate tells Hallie the family history including encounters with a local medicine woman considered by many to be a witch. She also finds that her father had been accused of an unsolved murder that happened 30 years previously. Overall, a very atmospheric story to read on a stormy night.
Helpful Score: 1
This book was a disappointment and waste of time. I admit that I didn't finish it, but I did get to the last chapter before I just couldn't take the childish writing, the pat scenes, the predictability, the lack of substance. And niggling at me throughout was the fact that the heroine did nothing all day. Nothing. She read books while waiting... she ate bowl after bowl of stew. She screamed like a little girl at inappropriate times. She inherited a fortune, a home, but never had to sign a darn piece of paper or do anything to but read books, wait, eat bowls of stew, bathe, or bed the lawyer, who should have been working on her legalities. Ridiculous, stereotyped ghosts. Book was absolutely filled with cliches and I am baffled that it actually got by editors.
Helpful Score: 1
Great little mystery/ghost story. I enjoyed it and thought it worth a read!
