Rachel's Holiday, Marian Keyes

"They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no." Amy Winehouse

Rachel's Holiday comes as a result of a mistake. Sure, Rachel Walsh takes drugs socially, but everyone does it in her circle of sophisticated friends in New York, it doesn't mean she's an addict. And yes, she understands that it looks like she attempted suicide when she had to be taken into hospital to get her stomach pumped, but really she was just buzzing and couldn't get to sleep so she just kept on taking sleeping pills to help, but not before jotting down a few ideas for poems which, okay, if you look at the notes out of context could possibly be construed as a "goodbye, cruel world" sort of message if you squint enough, but really, it's all just a huge misunderstanding and she's sure that it can all be sorted out.

But her parents send her goody-too-shoes sister Margaret over to bring her home to Ireland and check her into the Cloisters, a rehabilitation centre. Oh, well, Rachel needed a holiday anyway. She could do with a bit of aromatherapy and saunas and general pampering while everyone else got their heads sorted out. But when she gets to the Cloisters, it's not the swanky health spa she expected. Not only does she have to share a room - if you can call it that and not a broom cupboard - with an over-talkative older lady, but there are no saunas, no swimming pools, Rachel is expected to help with the housework and spend her days in group therapy having her childhood poked and picked at by an aggressive nun named Josephine. And no drugs at all. Not even for the people like Rachel who don't have any actual problems with them.

I was given Rachel's Holiday at a World Book Night, by a young lady who had "expected it to be a bit chicky, but it wasn't." It is an easy read, written in short chapters and compelling enough to ensure that I zipped through the 600+ pages in a day and a night, but it is not fluff. I realise that my understanding of "chick lit" is still a rather derogatory one of shoes, sex and shopping, no doubt influenced by Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series. Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday is easy to read, women's fiction but it is not fluff. There is a good mix of humour and pathos as we get to understand Rachel and the other people in the Cloisters, all going through very different situations and yet facing the same personal problems and daily temptations.

You can tell from the start that Rachel is an unreliable narrator - she doth protest too much. At first she downplays her actions, failing to mention the full extent of her drugs habit and the means she must go to in order to keep it up. We begin to learn the truth through other people's reactions, for example, Rachel describes herself as a big girl, but when she arrives back in Ireland, people remark how skinny she is - a comment that goes over Rachel's head but not the reader's. Despite her deep denial, constant shirking of all responsibility for herself or others and self-absorption, I really liked Rachel. Whether I would have liked her if the story had been told through another person's eyes, or by a third person narrator, is another matter. I suspect not. But as it was, I felt for her when it finally hits home to her how far she's fallen. As she makes the effort to get her life back on track, not always succeeding but trying again, I really feel for her and want her to succeed and make a good life for herself. An enjoyable, lightish read with plenty of substance and a decided lack of shoe shopping.

Shiver, Maggie Stiefvater

It would be impossible to review this novel about a teenage girl who falls in love with a werewolf without comparing it to Twilight, so I won't even try. Indeed, there is a lot that is similar about the two books, including the peripheral mythical-creature characters who seem to have come from the same mould: benevolent father-figure, angry female, rather unhinged, angry one. However, it is a shame to me that Twilight is the one that is in the centre of teen culture at the moment, and that Shiver is overlooked as yet another paranormal romance, a bandwagon-jumper. I won't deny that it fits right into those categories, and don't claim that it is Great Literature, but it is, at least, better. (And not because I like werewolves, and am sick of vampires, especially of the Black Ribbon variety out of the context of the Black Ribbon.)

Firstly, the relationship between Grace and Sam is more than mere idolisation/"I want to drink your blood." When Grace was a little girl, she was attacked by a pack of wolves that lived in the woods behind her house, but saved by one of their own, a wolf with bright yellow eyes. As she grows up, she becomes fascinated by the wolves to the point of obsession. She is an introverted, lonely girl who longs for her parents to give her more attention. When she meets Sam as a boy her own age, and recognises by his yellow eyes that he is the same wolf who saved her, a werewolf, yes, it is a strange love-at-first-sight moment, she is obsessed with the wolf, so inevitably if he is also human and eligible, she can't do anything but fall in love with him. But when she was attacked, she was bitten. She should be a werewolf too, but for some reason she never changed. But there is something of the werewolf nature in her. She has this shared experience with Sam, and shared memories, even shared dreams.

We see their relationship developing as boy-and girlfriends, read about them making breakfast together, spending time in a bookshop, doing normal couple-things and coming to know each other. But Sam is struggling against his nature as werewolf. Unlike Edward "Mr Sparkle" Cullen, this battle is visible, not just his saying, "I'm dangerous. No, really, I am." Because the werewolves of Shiver are not subject to the phases of the moon, but the changing seasons. They are human in the summer, and wolves in the winter. Yet with each change, they lose a little of themselves. They stay wolves for longer each year, and shorter times as humans, until eventually they are wolves the whole year round. This is Sam's last year as a human, and it is a real battle to keep from changing that last time, to spend as much time as he possibly can with Grace.

Stiefvater's descriptions of the Minnesota setting as the year approaches winter are, in my opinion, the most vivid part of the book: atmospheric, isolated and chilly. The small details come together subtly, woven into the narrative so that I didn't really notice them until I realised that I knew exactly what Grace's home looked like: a large, wooden house with a long porch/verandah along one side. It is the only house visible, set back from the road with a large, frosty yard. Behind the house, all you can see is miles and miles of trees. It is not actually snowing in my mind's picture, but the frost is on the ground turning it white and crunchy.

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

When you read a lot of books, it is inevitable that many of them leave you disappointed. Occasionally, however, a book comes along that is close to perfect. I found that two years ago, unexpectedly, when I reached the end of A Tale of Two Cities. At the beginning of last year, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief left me speechless. And a few weeks ago, I discovered The Little Stranger (which has now been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I will be disappointed if it doesn't win.)

The Little Stranger is a ghost story of sorts, set just after the end of the Second World War, in Hundreds Hall, an old house whose family are losing control of it. The Ayres family have the house, but not the money to run it, and strange phenomena start occurring. The narrator is one Doctor Faraday, the son of one of the former maids at Hundreds who becomes friends with the family. As he becomes more intimate with the Ayres family: the widowed Mrs Ayres, her son Roderick and daughter Caroline.

The novel reads as though it were written at the time in which it is set. Waters not only uses the vocabulary of the era, but stylistic conventions. For example certain words are not spelled out, but contain dashes. Similarly, when characters mention a recent scandal, the name is omitted.

The central character in The Little Stranger is not Doctor Faraday, or any one of the Ayres family, but Hundreds Hall itself, which takes its place in a long line of old crumbling houses in the Gothic tradition, from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Stephen King's Overlook Hotel. The atmosphere of the house begins as one of shabby nostalgia, a sorry memory of grander times. Waters skillfully evolves that atmosphere, through one of intrigue as Roderick starts to think that there is something wrong with the house. At first the signs are petty, seemingly harmless, such as furniture moving, and corresponding marks. These uncanny occurrences become more malevolent and when Dr Faraday notices dark marks all over the walls of Roderick's bedroom, spreading like mildew, like the "infection" Roderick feared. A creeping terror came over me as I read of those marks, which I knew corresponded with something terrible that would happen.

Sarah Waters never fully explains the "ghost," if ghost it is. Doctor Faraday, a man of science, stubbornly resists, in the face of evidence, that there is anything supernatural taking place at Hundreds Hall, and there is no moment of realisation. Traditionally in Gothic fiction, if the narrator is a scientist or a doctor, it is to add veracity to the tale - but Dr Faraday refuses to see what does not fit into his understanding. Waters through other characters suggests identities or explanations - Mrs Faraday believes the ghost of her late daughter Susan to be haunting her old house, and some of the clues seem to point to that, but others make no sense at all. Other characters suggest Roderick to be "haunting" Hundreds, or Caroline's repressed feelings. But Waters never gives an explanation. I started the novel wanting to know the answers, but when I reached the end I realised that a definite answer would be inevitably disappointing, while an open ending leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions, if they want to. Besides, I could not imagine a moment of realisation coming to Faraday - it would not fit with the novel or the character, and would be too tidy. Is "the little stranger" a straightforward ghost? Is it, like Poe's House of Usher, the house and the family, the one inextricable from the other? Is it some force influenced by one, or more, of the characters?

I read an interesting blog article by someone who goes by the name of "The Little Professor"  which suggests that the "Little Stranger" is Faraday himself. This was a possibility I had considered myself on reading the novel. After all, everything starts after Faraday starts spending time at Hundreds, and the idea of living at the Hall and restoring it to its former glory becomes an obsession with him - he becomes engaged to Caroline, but his love for her is unconvincing. It's the house he wants, not her.