Just Jennifer

Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling by Michael Boccacino (William Morrow, July 2012)

Fans of Jane Eyre will enjoy this creepier tale of the Darrow boys whose mother is recently deceased and whose nanny has just been found brutally murdered just outside their village of Blackfield.  Charlotte Markham, who has been working for Mr. Darrow, finds herself with two young charges, missing their mother and now their nanny, terribly.  On an outing in the forest, the trio finds themselves in The Ending, where Lily Darrow is waiting in the House of Darkling, a place as enchanted and mysterious as it is foreboding and sinister. Charlotte can only imagine how much Lily misses her boys, and knows how much the children miss their mother, and at first thinks that while the house is strange it is not all bad to let the family have this time together.  As Charlotte realizes quickly, Lily has made some unimaginable sacrifices in order to have some more time with her children, but if Charlotte is not able to undo what has already been set in motion, the Darrow’s fate will not be a good one, and neither will hers.

Fans of Victorian Gothic tales of horror will find themselves as quickly drawn into Then Ending as Charlotte and the Darrow boys.  Charlotte understands loss as most of her family is gone and after her husband perishes in a terrible fire.  Both creepy and delightful, this is not a story to read before going to bed, or to paraphrase Charlotte, “every night [you will dream] of the dead”.

Miss Me When I’m Gone by Emily Aresnault (William Morrow, July 2012)

When Jamie’s best friend from college, author Gretchen Waters, dies in a freak accident after falling down the library steps after a lecture, Gretchen’s family asks Jamie, who is in the late stages of her first pregnancy, to become Gretchen’s literary executor.  Gretchen’s first memoir Tammyland, in which Gretchen wrote about her divorce using the songs of classic country female legends such as Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette as frames for her travels across the country.  Gretchen’s next book was to be a similar format using male country legends as she traced her search for her birth father.  As Jamie begins to read through Gretchen’s notes, she realizes that Gretchen’s second memoir was not to be the light-hearted, find yourself book the first one was and begins to think that a murder that has been haunting Gretchen’s family for years may have finally come back to finish what was started over twenty years ago.  As Jamie races against the birth of her son, she fills in the gaps of Gretchen’s childhood that Gretchen never shared with her friend and hopes against hope that Gretchen left her what she needs in the jumble of notebooks and interviews and that Jamie can untangle it so Gretchen can rest in peace and her family can finally begin to heal.

This story about the bonds of friendships that are formed when we are younger that never go away no matter how much time passes also explores what obsesses us and how others’ obsessions become our own.  Jamie and Gretchen were in much different places in their lives when Gretchen died, Jamie struggling in her career as a traditional copy editor at a print newspaper, married and expecting their first child, Gretchen divorced from her college sweetheart and searching for the past she lost as a child.  Jamie takes on a big responsibility when she agrees to be Gretchen’s literary executor, and she doesn’t realizes just how big, but is willing to see it through as an old friend of Gretchen’s to help her new friends and family grieve and come to terms with not only Gretchen’s death, but with her life and how it shaped those closest to her.