A couple of nights in a haunted house. A bit of a laugh, really. Only now he can’t sleep and the vague, queasy feeling that he’d had when he’d first arrived in the house hasn’t let up. He has the sense of being … infected with something. [loc. 1777]
There are two timelines to this novel. 'Then', in the mid-Seventies, Cathy is living with her five home-schooled children (Lucy, Bee, Dan, Florian and Anto) on an isolated farm. The childrens' father Joe, an artist, is away 'for work', and odd things have begun to happen in the house. Light-bulbs don't last; marbles appear from nowhere; and Lucy (known as Loo) speaks in a voice that isn't her own. Paranormal investigators from the local university show up, disrupting the situation and forcing a crisis.
'Now', in the present day, Cathy is living in a care home, Lucy is grown up and the other children live abroad. A woman named Nina is keen to discuss the phenomena experienced at the farmhouse, and the investigation that went so tragically wrong. Lucy, not wanting her mother disturbed, agrees to help with Nina's new investigation, but she's uneasy about raking over the past. And rightly so.
At the heart of this novel is the relationship between the two sisters, Bee and Loo: Bee is unsettling, and possibly unhinged, and Loo is almost wholly caught up by her sister's influence. I was reminded to some extent of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, though that novel's compelling quality is partly due to its use of the first-person narrative. The Wayward Girls is told in third person, focussing on Loo / Lucy: it's still not a very reliable narrative, though.
Bee's absence in the 'Now' timeline feels like a missing tooth, and could have done with being explained sooner. I was not altogether surprised by the initial twist: the subsequent reversal felt somewhat rushed, and not wholly coherent. It's an intriguing scenario, and the Seventies chapters are claustrophobically atmospheric: but it didn't quite come together for me, perhaps because many of the characters seemed shallow in contrast to the two sisters at the heart of the story.
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