The Winter Ghosts

Sfeervol spookverhaal. Beetje voorspelbaar, maar vlot en intrigerend geschreven vol melancholie en atmosfeer. Eentje om vanonder een dekentje in één keer uit te lezen.

I'm pretty certain if this book was any longer I wouldn't have finished it. Saying that, it's strange that for such a short book, my main thought was that it needed a damn good edit. A short story may have worked, but as a novel it did nothing for me. There were some interesting ideas somewhere underneath all the waffle, but the execution was flawed and overall reading this was a bit of a drag. Many parts of the book turned out to be largely unnecessary to the only interesting part of the story, the crux of the ghost story, that happened right in the very last chapters and seemed to be more of undeveloped plot device, not the overall focus. The paranormal elements were laughable and unbelievable really, which is a shame because the history the ghost story was based on would have actually been really interesting to explore. The ramblings protagonist/narrator's rambling irked me from the start, but got progressively worse throughout, and even he admits many times that basically he can't understand why he acted in certain ways, which leads me to believe these actions was all the author could come up with to move the story along. In short, not one I'll be recommending.

2.5 rounded up.
An insipid cup of tea served with a disappointing biscuit.