Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

love the first chapter. There's a lot of invented slang that I am loving, The story is set in a post-apacolyptic Pacific NW in an area called Dismal Notch, which is a real place and local, but not the one in this novel.

I am determined to finish today.

She's finally directly addressed her charge to her charge.

The governess is so terribly shocked and horrified by the evil of ghosts only she seems to have seen, recounts ghostly conversations to Mrs. Grose that... never happened, according to her own accounts. Nothing's happened. She's alternately humbled by her inferior gender and social rank, and desperate for attention from her employer—whom she will never see again—and Miles. She fails to search for a new school for him.

Apparently, contemporary readers believed this was a ghost story. I assume the governess is delusional. James called his own story a "potboiler." The entire good/evil thing doesn't work for me.

Reading this aloud.

It's steady and interesting, a good book, but even so I suspect this will make a better show than it does a book.

Delightful! And political!

We lift one curled hand every time I read, "A pause." Every chapter, sometimes twice on one page. [Yes, that 2-word sentence was annoying, but now in a patient, humorous way because we lift a paw.]