The Ghosts of Merry Hall - review
Nov. 22nd, 2025 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
watervole
Disclaimer - I'm a good friend of the author -but if I hadn't genuinely liked the book, I'd simply have avoided writing a review.
I had high exceptions, as I know Heather - MA in creative writing, judge for the Carnegie medals, etc.
But, also :) far more importantly from where I stand - she's an excellent musician for longsword dancing!
I've done a fair bit of editing work in my life, so I tend to evaluate novels on both how well written they are, and how much I enjoyed the story.
Ghosts of Merry Hall is very well written
You can always tell which character is narrating. Firstly because a new chapter starts whenever this changes, and secondly because they have really distinctive voices.
You learn about Nell - a mother with a teenage daughter who is recently separated from her husband, and Dolly the ghost, by the way they view the world around them.
Dolly desperately wants to make contact with someone, to tell the story of what happened in the past, but making contact with the living is hard. And every effort leaves them more scared and less likely to want to remain in Merry Hall...
As the haunting gets more intense, the atmosphere gets tenser and tenser.
We learn about the past through Dolly's memories - and very interesting memories they are - but Dolly in the present day is desperate for those memories to be more widely know, even if there is a cost to the living.
It's interesting. As a reader, I'm sympathetic to Dolly, but I'm very glad I'm nowhere near her!
I don't normally read ghost stories - I don't really like being scared... So, for me, the book is only a four. But for someone who enjoys a good haunting, it may well be a five.
PS. I love the cover art. It was nice working through the story and realising where each element in the artwork had come from in the story
