Dead Enough by Cathie Cameron

Dead Enough is a suspense/thriller novel about a woman torn between her abusive past and her future. There is an exciting twist ending that I won't spoil, but most of the book is about the main character's turmoil over her family.


The story is really engages you, worrying about what will happen with Charlotte and her horrible family! It's a very quick read, fast-paced and never dull. It gets into a little bit of detail in the Charlotte's abusive childhood, but nothing too disturbing or nightmare-inducing I didn't think.

I think the most interesting part of the book is the take on dementia, old age, and family roles in caregiving. It's an interesting perspective on all of that, it seemed pretty realistic to me.

I feel like I should disclose that I know the author of this book and am totally biased! I really did enjoy the book though, I highly recommend you check it out.

Spook by Mary Roach

Yay Mary Roach! She is always fun to read! Spook is subtitled "Science Tackles the Afterlife" and that pretty much sums it up. This book goes into all kinds of people looking into what happens to the mind/soul after death. The methods and topics range from bizarre to silly to genuinely scientific. Plausible explanations are given for all kinds of phenomena that people take as evidence of souls or ghosts. For example, electric fields and infra-sounds both can cause ghost-like hallucinations. Roach writes Spook with her characteristic humor and passion for science!


I think that Roach succeeds in offering an honest exploration of the science and pseudoscience of the afterlife, without being tendentious or biased. I went into the book with a higher degree of certainty regarding the so-called soul's demise at death than I left with, which really surprised me. Some of the legitimate researchers she interviewed definitely makes me think there could be more to the whole soul thing than I had thought! I am not saying this book suggests the existence of a typical, cloudy and harp-intensive heaven (if you go in thinking that you may be disappointed) but it does suggest that maybe some energy or something could exist that is not (yet) properly accounted for by science.


Mary Roach's excellent style can be summed up as a combination science-mindedness, great writing and humor. She interjects one or the other in frequently, and it really works for me. Her humor often uses a certain formula. Roach will note an amusing phrase, or a word used in a funny context in her interviews or research, and then shortly later refer to the phrase again in a slightly different context as if it were a normal thing to say. It cracks me up every time!

One problem I have with Roach's writing is her casual references to animal cruelty. She did this extensively in Stiff as well as in Spook. It diminishes my enjoyment of a book (or TV show, or movie...) to feel like I have to have my mental guard up against vivid images of disturbing things. I am sure the horrible ways in which pseudo-scientist researchers trying to measure souls killed little animals is important to the subject at hand, but I really, really could have done without it.

All in all, this is a great book. I wouldn't hesitate to suggest it to most adults. Probably not kids, because it has rather adult themes at times and it even disturbed me in places. I would suggest this book to my die-hard atheist friends, my religious friends, or my new-age mom. I even suggested it to my fiance who is very defensive of his idea of the afterlife! Whatever your perspective on the afterlife is, Mary Roach's humor, tact, use of science and research and disinterestedness is engaging, fascinating and fun! I can't wait to read her other books!

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, by Helen Grant

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, by Helen Grant. Delacorte Press, 2009. 287 pp. 978-0-385-3441703.

... in which a young girl and her friend investigate the disappearance of several children from their village.

This book, set in a small village called Bad Munstereifel in Germany in the late 1990s, is told from the perspective of a 10 year old girl. Ostensibly a fairy tale, this is certainly a book meant for adults, not children.

The story opens at a Christmas dinner, where young Pia and her family are preparing to eat. Her paternal grandmother, who has a penchant for hair spray, tries to light the Advent candles and instead lights herself on fire, and is promptly immolated. Pia becomes the biggest pariah at her elementary school, and everyone refers to her as the girl whose grandmother exploded. The other children mock her, and shun her in case the "exploding" is contagious.

Pia's only friend is another social outcast, a child with the unfortunate nickname of Stink-Stefan. The two of them frequently go to visit an elderly man, Herr Schiller, who fascinates them with folktales and ghost stories, all part of the little town's history (a real town, and the stories are real folktales from the town's history). Meanwhile, a young girl at Pia and Stefan's school goes missing from a town festival. With Herr Schiller's ghost stories in mind, Pia and Stefan immediately suspect that Katharina's disappearance is supernatural in origin. Their suspicions are confirmed when other girls begin to vanish. Together, Pia and Stefan set out to discover the witch or ghost or spirit that is behind the kidnappings.

Although told from the perspective of a child, and interlaced with Herr Schiller's folktales, the themes of this book are decidedly not for children. Adult readers will read between the lines in the interactions between the adults; because the adults know that a child is listening to their conversations, they often speak of the abductions in veiled terms, and sometimes the things that are not spoken are the darkest themes of the book. The author, Helen Grant, does an admirable job of telling a story from a 10 year old girl's perspective, but keeping the storyline aimed at adults (or teens). As a backdrop to the mystery of the disappearing girls, we have glimpses of more mundane aspects of Pia's life: the nastiness of her fellow schoolchildren, the pettiness of the adult gossips, the slow dissolution of her parents' marriage.

It's a quick, fairly light read (I read about 80% in one sitting). The characters are well-developed (or as well-developed as they can be, seen through a child's eyes), and the plot never drags. The folktales that are mixed in with the narrative are appropriately eerie and chilling, and feel like real tales that you might hear from an old man by a campfire. The pacing of the climax at the end of the book is maybe a bit rushed, but not distractingly so. The solution to the mystery is no huge surprise, but it also wasn't something that was glaringly obvious early on, either. The ending of the book left me a little sad, because although they solved the mystery, the ending of the book wasn't exactly sunshine and rainbows. I think that my sadness is also a testament to how well Grant was able to get the reader to connect with the characters.

I do have one large complaint. With a cover like this, and the description of "modern fairy tale" on the cover, I expected talking cats. Lots of talking cats. To my sadness, there was one ghost story about witch cats, and one cat in Pia's village, and none of them talked.

Rating: 5 stars out of 5