Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* There's more than one way to be haunted. In Stein's first novel since his popular The Art of Racing in the Rain (2008), a 14-year-old named Trevor uncovers the dark mysteries surrounding the mansion built by his great-great-grandfather, a timber baron in the Pacific Northwest. While Trevor's father is ostensibly there to sell the property and position himself to save his faltering marriage, Trevor begins to suspect there's a soul at the mansion determined to see it returned to nature. Stuck in the house with his demented grandfather and flirtatious aunt, the perceptive teenager learns about his family's legacy, his forebears' avarice causing damage as it echoes down the generations. A sense of intrigue pervades Trevor's quest to discover more about the house and its history, and Stein succeeds in capturing both heavy and heady emotions. The sentiments resonate so well that readers will likely overlook the somewhat jarring journal entries written like book chapters, complete with dialogue. Although the estate comes with all the requisite creaks, hidden doors, and tumbledown grandeur of a standard haunted house, there's much more to this story than the average spooky tale. With a sincere narrator, dizzying flights of prose, and tightly bound relationships, the supernatural is almost beside the point. Less spine-tingling than heart-wrenching, A Sudden Light is haunting in all the right ways.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a complete change of pace from his dog-centric The Art of Racing in the Rain, Stein transports the reader to Riddle House, a 100-year-old mansion made entirely of wood overlooking Puget Sound. Jones Riddle and his 14-year-old son, Trevor, move there following the failure of Jones's business and his ensuing separation from Trevor's mother. Jones has come to Riddle House to help his younger sister, Serena, persuade their Alzheimer's- afflicted father to sell the family land, which is worth a fortune, to housing developers. But supernatural forces stand in the way of the deal. Clever Trevor, as he is called, begins to see ghosts and have visions. Researching the history of the Riddle clan-rapacious timber barons-he finds that it is rife with sexual secrets, incest, illness, and even madness, which forces him to realize that his dream of seeing his family whole again might come at too great a cost. With its single setting and small cast of characters (ghosts not included), the story's feeling of claustrophobia adds to the tension. Stein dramatizes the various tensions between his characters well, although narrator Trevor comes off as a tad precocious for 14. The history of the Riddle family fails to shock after a while, even as events in the present lead to the tragic denouement. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Stein's best-selling The Art of Racing in the Rain was successfully, if unconventionally, narrated by a dog. This time around, the author tries channeling gifted 14-year-old Trevor Riddell, with mixed results. Though the story is told in part as flashbacks by an older, wiser Trevor, he says and does things as his younger self that just don't feel authentic or consistent. It's 1990, and Trevor and his father Jones arrive at the Riddell family estate at the northern edge of Seattle. Built by Trevor's great-great-grandfather, a ruthless timber baron, Riddell House and the surrounding forested acreage are at the crux of a family struggle. Jones and his unusual sister, Serena, want to develop the property and regain their lost fortunes, but Samuel, their father, is reluctant to leave the home where his wife died. Trevor, sometimes precocious and observant and other times dim, is visited by a persistent ghost who's intent on shining light on everyone's hidden motivations. VERDICT While this purported ghost tale starts strong, an earnest environmental message and other philosophizing bogs it down in a silly, overly dramatic plot. Critical readers looking for a complex, chilling tale should try Rebecca Makkai's The Borrowers instead. [See Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]-Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This monotonous multigenerational tale of a family and its timber empire will have the reader sawing logs in no time.The narrator, Trevor Riddell, is the 14-year old scion of the cursed Riddell family. It is 1990, and he and his father, Jones Riddell, have returned to the North Estate, the family's 200-acre ancestral home on Puget Sound, to come to grips with their respective mom problems. Trevor is trying to repair his parents' unraveling marriage, while Jones is trying to come to grips with his mother's mysterious death. The remaining inhabitants of the decaying mansion are Grandpa Samuel, the intermittently senile, perpetually drunk paterfamilias, and Serena, Jones' seductive sister, a Tennessee Williams-heroine wannabe. Dysfunction doesn't begin to describe this tortured family. The curse goes back to Elijah Riddell, Trevor's great-great-grandfather, whose sins are visited on his successors. But Elijah's evil actions are never described in any detail other than vague references to destroying forests and ruining lives. Likewise, the author takes for granted the supernatural qualities of the house. When ghosts finally make their appearances, it's as preposterous as the rest of this tall tale. Trevor's oddly modern gay great-uncle Benjamin is the lead ghost. For almost 400 pages, the characters obsess about whether the rotting mansion should be sold or torn down. The fatal flaw here is the author's decision to have a teenager narrate this complex, sprawling story; though a prologue indicates that Trevor is recalling it from adulthood, he stays essentially within his teen perspective, and no matter how precocious he was, he couldn't possibly have had the vantage point to describe the whole situation. To solve that problem, the author supplements Trevor's knowledge with letters, diaries and ghostly speeches that magically pop up where explication is needed. A repetitive, poorly conceived work of pulp fiction. Frankly, we're stumped. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
