Book Review: "The Ghostwriter" by A.R Torre

"I fear that I'll tell everything, and still no one will understand"

The Ghostwriter by A.R Torre

I have never read anything by A.R Torre before but, everyone here knows how much I enjoy the odd cheap book. Needless to say, as I write this, I have just been on a library and bookshop trip which means of course I have spent money on books - though I swear I have been good. So is A.R Torre the kind of writer I will read more of? Perhaps, though not yet. The Ghostwriter is a book about a secret from a woman whom I have to say, we don't start off by liking. Be that as it may, it is well written and makes for an interesting reading experience.

Helena Ross has terminal brain cancer and won't be able to writer her books anymore. She effectively 'retires'. She's been given a few months to live but wants to tell one last story out of guilt for what happened. She decides to therefore use the little time she has left to write a kind of confessional about her life and times. As A.R Torre establishes this character, we have someone we feel sorry for but not someone we would like to befriend. Helena can be a bit abrupt at times and she doesn't have a warm main character mannerism about her. However, it is this character flaw which makes us question her as well. We automatically wonder about what she did in the past and why.

Helena is upset about losing her husband, Simon and her daughter, Bethany. She seems constantly haunted by their ghosts and yet, she explains that she already spoke to the police about them back when they died. If I know anything about thrillers though, there's more to this story than meets the eye. For some reason, we constantly feel like Helena is hiding something from us. She's not telling us the whole truth, but she's being carefully not to tell flat out lies either. Perhaps this is the nature of a writer - someone who wants to tell us something but also wants to wait until it's the exact right time to do so. And that means it must be the right time for them not for you. Of course, we suspect that Helena had something to do with the deaths of Simon and Bethany though at this moment we don't know what she did or why.

She states that suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of Bethany, she invited her mother, Janice, to stay over and help look after Bethany. She gets her agent to hire Marka Vantly, a literary rival, to help her write this as she can no longer do it herself. Marka Vantly happens to be someone else entirely though which only thickens the plot line. The author slowly starts to manage Helena's life though and thus, as the story of her past thickens, we have a literary rival taking over her life. Honestly, this past and present meeting is something which helps the thriller move under the skin. Helena is someone we don't fully know about but as we start to learn more, we aren't really sure we want to know anymore. Then...

she locks herself in her dead daughter's bedroom to write the final part of the confession, alone.

It gets quite upsetting because of the way in which we learn about everything, through the eyes and mind of someone who is clearly suffering some detrimental ails to their brain health. This means there is a hint of 'did this actually happen?' within. The unreliability makes us sense that there is always something being held back from the reader. Nothing feels like it just comes out. It is like the truth is constantly spoken through gritted teeth. The words are fighting to get out, or stay in.

All in all, I enjoyed this book but I think I will be leaving A.R Torre alone for a while. Don't get me wrong, it's a great book but this one was a bit twisted and I have a number of others to read yet. As I have also said, I have been on a bit of a book haul. I hope though, I come back to her.

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