cedar_grove | A Better Quick Read

No treasure. A tiny book. Or at least a section of a book. It had a hard front cover, but looked like it had been torn apart. She flicked through it and saw that it was handwritten, but realised immediately it could not be her grandmother's: the first page was headed with a date in 1793. The Resurrectionists by Kim Wilkins

I definitely enjoyed this book more than the previous one. To a degree it kept me guessing, and was more vibrant and interesting. Basic premise is that a disenchanted cellist decides to go and find her maternal grandmother in a little town in Yorkshire. She comes all the way from Australia to do so. Arriving she finds her granmother has died, and the townsfolk don't seem particularly fond of visitors. It seems the town has a secret, and one which the inhabitants don't want discovered. Of course Masie does... by virtue of finding an old diary hidden in her grandmother's house... and she has strange and terrifying things happen to her too - all to do with the reason why the inhabitants of Soulgreve live well into their hundreds.

Much of the story is told through Masie's reading of the diary and while there's nothing wrong with that it does leave the book with two distinct 'voices,' and if asked to choose which was the better of the two, I would say the first person of the diary is more compelling than the third person narrative.

The one thing that I didn't really like about this book was the choice of names. They all seemed to me to be either old fashioned (and while you can excuse that to a degree with the townsfolk, and of course in the diary), it felt a little bit affected in the rest of the story. Still, it's a writer's prerogative to name her own people, I suppose.

Definitely better than Fallen Angel but still not a masterpiece of writing, though it is entertaining.