Review: The Night Strangers

The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

Quote: " Nothing to say. You just keep that greenhouse for the girls- the twins. You just keep them twins safe."~ Hewitt Dunmore

 pg. 161

Started: May 16, 2012

Finished: May 31, 2012

hardcover/ 375 pages

From the cover:

In a dusty corner of  a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has been long sealed shut with thirty-nine 6-inch-long carriage bolts. 

  The home's new owners are chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his seventy-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine failure. Unlike "the Miracle on the Hudson," however, most of the passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine__ a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door. Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in this sparsely populated white Mountain village- self-proclaimed herbalists- and their interest in her fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous?

  The result is a poignant and powerful ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have come to expect from bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian: a palpable sense of place, an unerring sense of demons that drive us, and characters we care about deeply.  The difference this time? Some of those characters are dead.

My Review:

I hate to give this book a bad review. I really, really wanted to love it. Alas, I didn't. It starts out so slow, and drags on and on about the details of the airplane, the flight, the final moments from so many different perspectives. The book is divided into parts, 4 in all. Part 1 is almost entirely about the flight that ends the lives of thirty-nine people. Which does  eventually, have significance. It just seems to take a long way getting there. 

 I also felt this book was a hodge-podge of stories. there was way too many elements in one novel. e.i.( pilot, tragedy, herbalists/witches, twins, PTSD, ghosts...) It's like Bohjalian had so many good story ideas and then ruined it by putting them all into one novel. 

Sometimes less....really is more!

3 stars(only because some of it was interesting enough to keep me reading until the end)