#27, The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

"The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter, and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life."

That's what the book jacket says. Don't believe it - clearly the copywriter was not reading the same text. While this isn't the most horrible book I've read this year (though definitely in the bottom five), it has been WAY over-hyped, most especially by Barnes n' Noble.

The Thirteenth Tale and I started on the wrong foot -- having been compared to Jane Eyre and having stolen from Jane Eyre (you know, fire-ravaged house, crazy relative locked away, and an innocent entering that world), I expected more. And when the book didn't deliver, then I just found the device to be pretentious. I mean, who compares their own book to Jane Eyre, for god's sake?

A better choice would have been Flowers in the Attic. Every character has some freakish story (evil twin, dead conjoined twin, abandoned baby, etc) and every character is unlikeable for one reason or another (evil being the central affliction, along with boring, naive or too one-dimensional). Add to that a healthy helping of incest and abuse, and you have Flowers in the Attic for the erudite.

The biggest problem with the novel is that the premise is unconvinving, and a novel cannot survive that. We are introduced to Vida Winter, England's most famous living novelist, who has invited our dull and mousy protagonist to write her life story. In short order, we learn that her uncle has an unhealthy (to put it mildly) fixation on her mother, and their coupling produces two very disturbed children, twin girls, Adeline and Emmeline. I won't ruin the story for those who are still interested by detailing it, except to say that Adeline (who has been presented as Vida Winter, pre name change) is an evil child who delights in beating her twin mercilessly and destroying whatever she is able to get her hands on. That's fine (we're back to Flowers in the Attic again), but it is entirely unbelievable that this child has grown up into a productive adult, ie Vida Winter. So, at the end of the novel, when the big "shocking" plot turn rolls around to work this out, it's not all that shocking. It just takes 300+ pages to get to the explanation of what was obvious from the beginning. 300 VERY long pages.

It brings me back to my central complaint of all bad books: with so many great ones out there, why did I waste time reading this drivel?

Not sure what my next book choice is going to be, though it is coming down to either Barack Obama's first or High Fidelity. I only have three more books to read this year to make my goal, but a new job, so I think the last three will most likely be fun, easy reads. I'm saving Lolita for the first book of 2007.