The Burning Girls

By -

 The Burning Girls, by C. J. Tudor

I'd seen good reviews of this gothic thriller, so when I saw it at the public library I took it home.  Then I had to read it since library books come with a deadline!

Reverend Jack Brooks, single mom, is forcibly transferred to the tiny Sussex village of Chapel Croft after a devastating tragedy in her previous inner-city parish.  Her daughter Flo, age 15, is naturally none too happy about this.  And Chapel Croft has a history -- several Protestants were burned as martyrs under Queen Mary I, and thirty years ago, two girls disappeared and were never seen again.

Everyone in the village talks a lot about fresh starts and leaving the past behind, which is remarkably unhelpful as Jack promptly starts getting warnings and strange packages that nobody wants to talk about.  Flo meets both the local outcast nerd boy and the local bullies, and Jack is nervously protective about the whole thing.  

As they try to settle in, it becomes clear that in Chapel Croft, the past is not going away.  Is the churchyard really haunted?  What happened to Joy and Merry 30 years ago?  Everyone is holding on to some secrets, even Jack herself.

There is a lot going on here, and quite a few flashbacks or interludes that require you to slowly piece together who is narrating and what's going on.  Tudor doesn't make it easy, but the clues are there, so a reasonably astute reader will not be blindsided by the twists.  It's well-written and thrilling, though just on the edge of what I can take in the way of violence and so on.  I enjoyed it quite a bit and may decide to try another Tudor sometime.  Not something to read as a pick-me-up when you're down, but if you're in the mood for a spooky and somewhat gruesome thriller, this is a good one. 

Although -- it's a fun read, but the characters in the story stretch the reader's suspension of disbelief extremely thin.  In this minuscule village, there are a remarkable number of horrifying people, and not one healthy family relationship to be seen.  After a while you start to kind of go "Really?" 

Comments

  1. Joy Weese MollMarch 29, 2021 at 12:13 PM

    This might be a fun one to read for the October spooky season. That's the time of year when I tolerate a little more gruesomeness than usual.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanMarch 29, 2021 at 1:19 PM

    Yes, I was thinking it would be a perfect spooky fall read!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more