Now I was a pink-haired girl living in a giant haunted house, scheduled to play Dungeons and Dragons with my realtor’s son, like some kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl out of a shitty novel about a middle-aged man finding the will to live after his divorce. [p. 117]
I was hooked by the sample chapter and read this novel in a single afternoon. It's narrated by Norah, who's been living with her ex during the pandemic but is summarily told to move out. Luckily, she's just discovered that she's inherited the family house from her long-estranged, recently-deceased father. Norah takes the bedspread, her two cats, and all the toilet paper, and drives to the little town of Hope Falls, Ontario, where she discovers that the house is ... not exactly vacant. Haunted house? Weird neighbours? Repressed childhood memories? Bring it on.
The pacing is sometimes uneven, the final chapters are frantic, and a few plot points could have done with more resolution: but I liked Norah's narrative voice, and her determination to protect her cats, and I certainly empathise with her approach to social interaction: "...a lot of the pandemic protocols were things I could get used to one day when we were all vaccinated and no longer dealing with it. I dug masks. I really dug social distancing. I loved not shaking people’s hands. I loved people not getting in my space when I was shopping or on the sidewalk. I liked this new trend of minimizing the time someone was in my home. And not a single dude had randomly stopped me on the street to tell me to smile. If we could have all that without the death and suffering, I’d be happy." [p. 90]. An engaging read, with some interesting observations about the long-term effects of trauma ('reframing how we look at what we've become to cope' says the author in her afterword), and plenty of humour to leaven the darker scenes.
The cats, by the way, are absolutely fine.
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