Book Review: "The Artist of Blackberry Grange" by Paulette Kennedy

Paulette Kennedy is a great writer. If anyone remembers my review of The Devil and Mrs Davenport then they will definitely recall how I couldn't stop heaping praises on her writing style. The Witch of Tin Mountain was also a great novel but I have to be honest when I say Parting the Veil kind of let me down. I think Paulette Kennedy is best when she's writing period 'good for her' novels but then again, she's free to choose what she does with her writing. Let's take a look at her novel The Artist of Blackberry Grange then and see whether it has lived up to my expectations...

Sadie lives in 1925 and suffers two great losses: her engagement breaks and her mother dies. She's living in a boarding house in Kansas City and feels utterly broken emotionally. Sadie ultimately grasps the opportunity to become a live-in companion for her great aunt and so, she heads over to Blackberry Grange where her great-aunt was once a celebrated artist. Blackberry Grange might be in Arkansas but it is a huge mansion with a great amount of chaarcter. This is definitely starting off like a great Paulette Kennedy novel. The beginning establishes this character we feel bad for and her ability to stay resilient through this time is definitely something to be admired. I was hooked on to her from the beginning.

In a classic Statis House fashion, the once incredible Blackberry Grange is crumbling and decaying like the characteristics of the woman who lives there. The great-aunt (Marguerite) is suffering from dementia and her mind just drifts around here and there. The haunting atmosphere of the mansion is just incredible. It starts to feel like the house from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. The long corridors and old paintings give the house a whispering, old and terrifying quality where the walls seem to talk and the home itself is its own character with its own soul. Paulette Kennedy is definitely doing what she does best here.

As Sadie takes care of Marguerite, she also starts observing Marguerite painting portraits at an almost feverish pace. As Sadie watches on, she swears that sometimes she can see these paintings move - even if it is something as slightly as a tilt of the head or a movement of a limb. It feels very much like the kind of atmosphere set in The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. It is haunting, old and there are memories that perhaps should not be released from the mind. Some are far too dangerous. Again, I was very happy with Paulette Kennedy's return to form here where she takes on the grand, the bewildering, the maddening and the haunting once again.

It becomes clear that Marguerite is haunted by past loves she could not have and societal expectations she had to pay attention to. Other people are also involved including the older generation of Sadie's family and the other people in the house. The term 'flapper' is tossed around as Sadie witnesses how her great-aunt's illness isolates her further and further from the other people around her. The author does a brilliant job of depicting how the illness Marguerite has makes for part of her destruction as, now that her mind is in a state of confusion, she can no longer truly recall everything and so, the paintings reveal more than they are meant to.

Of course, there's some mind-bending stuff involved such as: visions in the art studio, the instability of time, the 'presence' of the paintings and the way in which the past intrudes on the present. There is a huge question about whether this is supernatural phenomena or just the confusions of dementia, but Sadie starts to experience them and then there's an even bigger question: is she actually seeing this right now? The author lets us into a world of absolute terror in which Sadie not only needs to protect herself, but also needs to find out who a mysterious man really is. This is a man with an even more complex story than her own.

All in all, this novel is part-mystery, part-haunting and part-family drama. The past and the present collide upon Sadie as she must confront the reality of her great-aunt's former life. It was fantastic.