*Book source ~ NetGalley
5 November 2013
Historical | Gothic
328 Pages
My Rating ~ 4 bites
William Bellman is
likeable, endlessly curious, and driven. When it looks like his life couldn’t
get any happier, tragedy strikes and a thoughtless moment from his boyhood
comes back to haunt him.
First I have to say that
I don’t know why this is called a ghost story. There’s no ghost unless you
count the moment in Bellman’s past that haunts him his whole life. Well, it
doesn’t actively haunt him, but there are moments when it migrates from his
subconscious to his conscious mind and it’s in those moments he feels as if he’s
going a little crazy. Anyway, no actual ghost is in this story.
Now, this is a different
kind of tale. Set in England, it never says what year, but it feels like it’s
the 1800s. It’s like a memoir of Bellman’s life. It starts when he and three
other boys are ten years old and Bellman kills a rook with his catapult
(slingshot). In his defense, he never thought his rock would travel the
distance and he did hesitate, but at the last moment he let it fly and wham.
Dead bird. This is the moment that comes back to haunt him again and again
through the book.
While there doesn’t
appear to be an obvious point to this story (to me anyway), I still found it
fascinating. William Bellman is an interesting man and I enjoyed learning about
the fabric mill and later the attention to detail when he opens Bellman &
Black, a store that caters to the dead. In other words, if someone dies,
Bellman & Black has everything a family needs for the funeral and mourning
periods. I don’t expect this story will appeal to everyone, but I enjoyed it.
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