We Have Always Lived in the Castle in Who Doesn't Love a Classic?

Oct 24, 2013 Book Concierge rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: murder, sisters, mental-illness, suspense, mystery, family, concierge, women-writers, library

Eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood narrates this story of her family’s isolation due to past scandal. She, her older sister Constance, and their Uncle Julian are all that’s left of the family living in the manor house on the outskirts of the village. They have regular routines and don’t lack for funds, but then their needs are simple. Every Tuesday and Friday Merricat walks into the village to drop off and pick up books at the library, and to buy groceries. She usually stops f Eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood narrates this story of her family’s isolation due to past scandal. She, her older sister Constance, and their Uncle Julian are all that’s left of the family living in the manor house on the outskirts of the village. They have regular routines and don’t lack for funds, but then their needs are simple. Every Tuesday and Friday Merricat walks into the village to drop off and pick up books at the library, and to buy groceries. She usually stops for a coffee, but avoids contact with others as best she can. The village children – and many adults – are merciless in teasing and taunting Merricat. She’s the only family member who ever leaves the estate, so she bears the brunt of the villagers’ cruelty. Then one day a cousin appears at their door, having come “for a visit,” and Charlie’s involvement changes everything.

Merricat is definitely in her own world – she buries objects around the property as talismans to protect her family. She insists that she will take them all to the moon where they’ll happily live in a paradise that includes winged horses. She is sure that certain people outside the nuclear family are demons or ghosts. Constance is an enigma – seemingly serene and unflappable yet a self-imprisoned recluse. Older than Merricat by ten years, she is the family caretaker, cooking and cleaning and organizing the household. And poor Uncle Julian is a broken man, a wheelchair-bound invalid whose mind is stuck in the past, as he relives the final day his family was intact.

This psychological study of a disturbed family is a short quick read but still offers a rather full exploration of various members’ distorted thinking. The tension is based on not knowing how things will turn out; the reader is constantly waiting for something dreadful to occur and even when things go badly the reader knows this can’t possibly be the end of it. The result is a suspenseful read without gore or graphic description. I’m reminded of several Hitchcock films which just kept us on the edge of our seats without showing a brutal murder. Even when the book is finished, I’m left anxious and in suspense.
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