 Thanks to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for the digital ARC of Amanda Quain’s Ghosted, which will be published Tuesday, July 25!
Amanda Quain’s Ghosted, a YA retelling of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, far exceeded my expectations. Quain uses her source material creatively but isn’t beholden to it, instead finding an emotional core that (I must admit) I found missing from Austen’s novel. Hattie Tilney attends Northanger Abbey, a ritzy private boarding school her family can afford because her mother, Dr. Tilney, is the headmaster. Despite the fact that her school is notorious for being haunted, Hattie is entirely anti-paranormal, convinced that those who hope to find a ghost are deluding themselves. Then, along comes Kit Morland, a handsome, quirky new student who is decidedly pro-paranormal. Normally, Hattie would avoid Kit completely, but her mother has assigned Hattie to be his ambassador, so she resigns herself to a few tours, some friendly chats, and that’s it. As the layers peel back on Hattie’s story, it becomes clear that this is really a novel about grief and healing. Immediately before her family moved to Northanger Abbey, her beloved father died of a cancer that killed him quickly. Hattie decided that her new school offered a chance at a fresh start, so she rejected the study of history, of hauntings, of ghosts that had so captivated her and her father. She makes new friends, does what she needs to do to be successful and moderately popular, and blends into the background. Until Kit. Kit immediately gets under Hattie’s defenses, and when they’re assigned to work together for their journalism class on a semester-long project focused on the ghosts of Northanger Abbey, Hattie realizes that everything she had suppressed is coming to the surface. Quain crafts brilliant, complex characters. Hattie, whose first-person narration drives the novel, is vivid and empathetic and sad. It’s clear that, while she looks out for her younger brother, Liam, and tolerates her older sister, Freddie, she’s not really connected with her family, particularly her mother, who she most often calls Dr. Tilney. As Hattie works through her college applications (she’s a senior), it becomes clear that she’s also not connected to the college path she’s committed to. Even her friends see only her surface. It’s only Kit who begins to see who Hattie really is and could be. I absolutely loved this novel, which so beautifully delves into both Hattie’s healing but also into the inevitably difficult transitions that all teenagers at this age must undertake and, of course, into the relationship that grows between Hattie and Kit. Watching her again feel her feelings is an incredible journey.
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 Thanks to partners NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the digital ARC of Katherine Center’s Hello Stranger. The book will be published next Tuesday, July 11!
Every time I pick up a new book by Katherine Center, I’ve come to expect joy. In 2020, when we interviewed her for the Unabridged Podcast upon the release of What You Wish For (shameless shoutout—you can listen here: https://www.unabridgedpod.com/post/134-whatyouwishfor-katherinecenter), Center talked explicitly about working toward joy, both in her life and her writing. She said, “[O]ne of the things that I really wanted to write about in this book in particular, like the kind of the place where I started with the story, was I wanted to write about joy. . . . [W]hen you find the right story for you, whatever that story is that you need at that particular moment in your life, it's so satisfying that it feels like joy.” With Center’s new book Hello Stranger, that feeling of joy was in full effect for me. At times, I was giddy as I read about Sadie Montgomery’s fierce attempts to wrestle back control over her life, her relationships, and her career—to find joy in the face of adversity. Sadie is a portrait artist on the cusp of finding the success she’s dreamed of ever since the tragic death of her mother—also a portrait artist—when she was a child. Her relationship with her father has never been what she wanted, and her relationships with her stepmother and stepsister are downright confrontational. But she has a good friend, Sue, and a sweet, aging dog she loves and a place to live and work (thanks to some gracious rule breaking from Sue’s parents, her unofficial landlords). And then she falls one day, merely walking across the street, and everything changes. Sadie finds out that she needs immediate brain surgery, and while the surgery is successful, it results in prosopagnosia. Face blindness. She can’t recognize anyone’s face, even her own, and she certainly can’t paint portraits, which means that the art competition on which she was counting is going to be a real challenge. The situation unfurls from there, of course, complicated by a potential romance with her dog’s veterinarian and a burgeoning friendship with the superficially-jerky-but-maybe-not neighbor who turns out to be pretty helpful when she needs it. In retrospect, there were a few elements of the plot that stretched my credulity just a bit, but they didn’t impact my reading experience at all. The story here is gorgeous and sometimes heart wrenching but ultimately joyful. Center considers the impact of Sadie’s face blindness on her life and her career and her relationships with great sensitivity, making excellent use of the need for Sadie to see things differently both literally and figuratively. I loved Hello Stranger. |
AuthorI'm Jen Moyers, co-host of the Unabridged Podcast and an English teacher. Archives
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