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Nov. 21st, 2019 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAfter I read The Haunting of Maddy Clare, several people suggested that I try The Other Side of Midnight, a later Simone St. James novel, to see if that worked better for me.
Like The Haunting of Maddy Clare, The Other Side of Midnight is also concerned with ghosts and the traumatic aftermath of WWI; in this one, heroine Ellie is straight-up a psychic. But a psychic who refuses to talk to ghosts! She's shy and it's very stressful!
...until her best frenemy Gloria, a glamorous jazz-and-liquor type who also happens to be London's only other real psychic, turns up dead after a seance gone wrong, and her brother hires Ellie to Investigate the Case, which turns out, to nobody's surprise, to be deeply wound up in the traumatic aftermath of WWI. Also On the Case is the paranormal investigator who ran tests several years ago quote-unquote proving that Ellie's mother was not a real psychic; despite this antipathy, it will shock no one to learn that over the course of the case he and Ellie fall in love, for ... reasons?
From a sample size of two, Simone St. James romances tend to develop on the basis of 'physical attraction' and 'destiny,' which is fine, if that's your thing. It's slightly more frustrating to me personally in this case than in The Haunting of Maddy Clare because Ellie and Gloria's good-girl/bad-girl psychic rivalry and mutual fascination is right there, fraught with unexamined sexual tension. "But Gloria is dead when the book begins -" Ellie is PSYCHIC and talks to GHOSTS, this is in no way a barrier!
St. James also clearly prefers her heroines relatively naive and virtuous; Ellie and Maddy Clare's Sarah have fairly similar voices, neither of them particularly sharp-edged. But they are very aware of the effect of World War I on the national psyche and lose no opportunity to remind us of it! Which is a topic that continues of interest to me, and this book is more thematically coherent about it than The Haunting of Maddy Clare, but for me I think it's still an "almost what I wanted but not quite."
(Also halfway through I misinterpreted a line and became convinced that the book's reveal was going to be that Ellie's mother, on whose behalf she's been nursing a grudge the whole time, was never psychic, which would have been really good and interesting, and I haven't quite forgiven the book for not conforming to the version I made up in my head. >.>)
Like The Haunting of Maddy Clare, The Other Side of Midnight is also concerned with ghosts and the traumatic aftermath of WWI; in this one, heroine Ellie is straight-up a psychic. But a psychic who refuses to talk to ghosts! She's shy and it's very stressful!
...until her best frenemy Gloria, a glamorous jazz-and-liquor type who also happens to be London's only other real psychic, turns up dead after a seance gone wrong, and her brother hires Ellie to Investigate the Case, which turns out, to nobody's surprise, to be deeply wound up in the traumatic aftermath of WWI. Also On the Case is the paranormal investigator who ran tests several years ago quote-unquote proving that Ellie's mother was not a real psychic; despite this antipathy, it will shock no one to learn that over the course of the case he and Ellie fall in love, for ... reasons?
From a sample size of two, Simone St. James romances tend to develop on the basis of 'physical attraction' and 'destiny,' which is fine, if that's your thing. It's slightly more frustrating to me personally in this case than in The Haunting of Maddy Clare because Ellie and Gloria's good-girl/bad-girl psychic rivalry and mutual fascination is right there, fraught with unexamined sexual tension. "But Gloria is dead when the book begins -" Ellie is PSYCHIC and talks to GHOSTS, this is in no way a barrier!
St. James also clearly prefers her heroines relatively naive and virtuous; Ellie and Maddy Clare's Sarah have fairly similar voices, neither of them particularly sharp-edged. But they are very aware of the effect of World War I on the national psyche and lose no opportunity to remind us of it! Which is a topic that continues of interest to me, and this book is more thematically coherent about it than The Haunting of Maddy Clare, but for me I think it's still an "almost what I wanted but not quite."
(Also halfway through I misinterpreted a line and became convinced that the book's reveal was going to be that Ellie's mother, on whose behalf she's been nursing a grudge the whole time, was never psychic, which would have been really good and interesting, and I haven't quite forgiven the book for not conforming to the version I made up in my head. >.>)
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Date: 2019-11-22 04:07 am (UTC)I've only read The Haunting of Maddy Clare (and on my reread of it this year I thought it was fun, but nowhere near as good as I remembered it being), but I do agree with you that good-girl narrators and romances that get their start with physical attraction first, emotional attraction later seem like they're very much Simone St. James's Things, which is fine...but I think those were both tropes that I was more interested in/tolerant of a few years back than I am now.
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Date: 2019-11-22 12:16 pm (UTC)I don't mind a good-girl narrator, but there is definitely something about the way that St. James' protagonists generally always have the moral high ground in all situations that makes me want them to be wrong or mistaken about a few more things.
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Date: 2019-11-23 06:54 pm (UTC)omggggggggg I'd be SO FRUSTRATED. And the mum being fake would be what I wanted, too.
Shame - I love, f'rinstance, Frances Hardringe's work partly for how good she is at cultural trauma - post-WW1, obviously, and then post-Darwin and Civil War in other books. More stuff along those lines'd be great.
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Date: 2019-11-24 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-24 01:41 am (UTC)It is not the same kind of story as the Simone St. James, but the title character of Vivien Alcock's The Haunting of Cassie Palmer (1980) is the daughter of a phony medium who wants Cassie, the seventh child of a seventh child, to follow in her footsteps as the real deal; meanwhile Cassie who can see ghosts without even having to work for it just wants to be a doctor. I recommend it.
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