Midnight (W)rite ~ Book reviews and other curiosities

In Brisbane, Australia, a passenger ship docks and the passengers disembark and disburse. A young girl of 4 is discovered on the docks by the wharf master, alone, sitting on a s mall suitcase. She doesn't know her name or where she is from. The wharf master takes her home and when, after several days, no inquiries are made about her, he and his wife decide to call her Nell and keep her as their own. The Forgotten Garden is the story of Nell's life, with the mystery of her family origins at its center. The story moves back and forth between the early 1900s, the 1970s, and 2005, and incorporates Nell's ancestors and descendants into the story as the mystery slowly unfolds. It is a dark, gothic tale full of family secrets with themes of enchantment and faerie tales woven throughout. I really liked the the character of Cassandra, Nell's granddaughter, and her time spent at the atmospheric Cliff Cottage on the edge of the sea. 

Darkly beautiful modern and medieval gothic love story Genre: Gothic horror, love story A man with a sordid lifestyle is severely burned in a car accident and gruesomely disfigured. As he recovers (miraculously) in the burn unit, he meets Marianne Engel, a woman who seems to know him who has wandered away from the psych ward and tells him stories about their shared past lives. Is she delusional, or are these stories real? How does she know the things she knows about him? Her tales become easier for him to believe as time goes by and he becomes increasingly attached to and dependent on her. This book holds so many of the keys to my interests: darkly romantic, gothic, German medieval history, monasteries, magical realism, folk and fairy tales, disturbingly deep passions, stories within a story... the author took a long time to research and write this book, and I feel like it shows in the intricacies of the layers of story. Turnoffs: the main male character's kind of a...

Coldest Girl: Holly Black's ode to the vampire genre Genre: Gothic fiction, horror, paranormal Tana lives in an alternate world where vampires are a dangerous reality. Their bite causes an infection that turns a person “Cold,” which means the person craves human blood with a violent, ugly passion. If the infected person actually ingests human blood, she becomes a vampire. If she can resist the siren call for 88 days (accomplished possibly through forced seclusion) she is cured of the bite. This doesn't happen very often. In Tana's world, the solution to the vampire problem is to send all vampires, infected humans, and vampire-loving humans to live in designated, enclosed 'coldtowns.' Coldtown is a little like Hotel California – you can check in, but you can never leave, with very few exceptions. The most powerful vampires are capitalizing on the desire of the average citizen to see what's going on inside the vampire cities by creating live video ...