The Good House

This is the season for haunted house stories. The Good House has a lot going for it: an interesting family saga, lots of scary scenes, and a strong female lead character.

Focused on Angela Toussaint, her teenage son, and her grandmother the story moves around in time as well as point of view. The essential conflict began with Angela's grandmother, who was quite powerful in dealing with the spirit world, but as these things often go, she pissed off the wrong entity. This creates a kind of inherited bad luck for her progeny. Later, Angela's son Corey manages to stir things up when he finds clues to grandmother's powers in the Good House.

I liked the parts with Corey and his friend Sean the best. I'm a middle-aged mother of a teenager myself, and I supposed I should have identified with Angela, but she seemed a little “out of my league.” Intelligent, sexy, athletic, the center of a love triangle with two successful men in love with her, a stellar career, heiress to a beautiful property, and best friends with a rising movie starlet, she is highly glamorous! To add a dose of family drama, she was estranged from her husband and had a tense relationship with her son. The story felt a bit soapy at times; I do love a good soap opera.

The ending's magical do-over felt like a fairy tale more than horror. I'm used to the notions of sacrifices being made at the end of a horror story. I'm uncertain as to whether or not Angela remembers anything that happened and this kind of takes away from the notion of growth as a person she might have experienced. I can see that the author loved her characters and wanted to see them happy.

Due is a good storyteller. I liked the characters and the way Due would give out the backstory information only at the most relevant moment. I would have liked to have known a bit more about Dominique, Angela's mother. I think that might have added a missing layer of depth to the story.

This was good enough to definitely keep me engaged but there's a lot of it that fell short for me. Including the ending.

I did not expect the turns this book took! I wasn't sure if I liked the characters at first, but I fell in love with them as I learned more about them, which made the plot points more powerful. The horror elements surprised me and were the exact perfect way to tell the story. I would have liked a little more about her grandma because there were a few things I had to guess at, but that was a tiny distraction.
Tananarive Due fit so much into this book and surprised me in so many good ways. I will definitely have to read more of her works.