Beth Gutcheon, More Than You Know
More Than You Know is made of two intertwined and interrelated stories. The first story takes place in the interwar period, and involves Hannah Gray, a girl from Boston who spends her vacations with her cold-hearted stepmother and her half brother in Dundee, Maine, where her grandparents live, while her father stays in Boston to work. That year, Edith, the stepmother, has rented a house which used to be a schoolhouse on Beal island, off the Maine coast, and which was rebuilt in Dundee. Soon, Hannah hears strange noises at night, and even sees a gruesome apparition that scares her to death. Keeping out of Edith’s way and far from the ghost, she meets Conary Crocker, a handsome boy from a poor Dundee family, and soon falls in love with him. But the ghost will not leave them alone…
The second story takes place in the 1850′s, and tells how Claris Osgood, a girl from a large happy family of Dundee, rebels against her family’s ways and marries Danial Haskell, a man from Beal island, because she thinks of him as a kindred spirit. Soon, Claris realizes that she has been mistaken about Danial, and that his mysterious silence doesn’t hide insights into her soul but an austere personality. He imposes his fundamentalist views on Claris. They have two children, Amos and Sallie, but their relationship keeps deteriorating…
Juggling between the story of a dysfunctional family, and the love story between Conary and Hannah, which are soon tied together by the ghost from the past, Beth Gutcheon has written a novel which could have been better, had the motivations of the characters from the Haskell family been made sufficiently clear. As it is, we get the impression that Gutcheon never knows whose point of view to adopt. Some parts are from Claris’s point of view, then from Sallie’s, then from another character’s. This could have been fine if it didn’t leave an impression of confusion. Instead of giving us new insights on the characters, the different visions contradict themselves so that we never really get to know the characters, and understand why they did the things they did. Did Gutcheon do this on purpose? In that case, she did it rather clumsily. The story set in the present is more convincing in the sense that it does a nice job telling a coming-of-age love story, and as a ghost story it is pretty effective. This was an average book, which reminded me a lot of The Weight of Water, but in both cases not representative of what I usually like to read…
Rating: 2,5/5
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment